Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun (1962) tells the story of three male migrant workers who are making a clandestine journey to Kuwait by hiding inside the empty water tank of a truck. When they are almost at their destination, the truck’s driver, Abul Khaizuran, is held up for a long time at a bureaucratic checkpoint. The stifling midday heat descends, and the metal water tank in which the men are hiding gets unbearably hot. It takes a long time for the driver to leave the checkpoint, and upon driving off, he discovers that the three men have died of heat inside the tank. Abul Khaizuran discards their corpses and gives in to his grief about how the tragic events unfolded. The novella ends with his refrain: “Why didn’t you bang on the walls of the tank? Why didn’t you say anything? Why?”

The ending of Men in the Sun has endured in political and literary debates because of Abul Khaizuran’s insistence that the Palestinian men trapped inside the tank did not protest their fates. They did not try to be heard. On one side is the literal interpretation of the ending: The Palestinians in the tank did not protest. On the other, there is the notion that they screamed out their agony and banged on the walls of the water tank, but their screams were deliberately ignored in the way Western governments, international media and neighboring Arab nations have historically done.

In his more recent book, titled Banging on the Walls of the Tank: Dispatches from Gaza, Haidar Eid explains: “‘Banging on the walls of the tank’ has become one of the most loved metaphors in Palestinian discourse of resistance. It is a reference to making noise in order to be heard, to draw the attention of the world to one’s suffering caused by imperialist powers, in general, and Israeli colonization of Palestine, in particular.” But Eid also sees the inherent problem in this: “We are aware of the fact that we are the centre of so much attention, yet, ironically, we are never heard from.”

With the Gaza genocide ongoing for the last three years, it has become abundantly clear that Palestinians have told their stories, represented themselves and documented their own suffering with ferocious dignity, and at the highest possible volume. Compared to previous years, the Palestinian cause might be more popular than ever, but it is hard not to notice that big, Western, mainstream amplification of the Palestinian cause only comes when the Palestinian experience is filtered through the perspectives of progressive and anti-zionist Jews, dissident Israelis and white people.

Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who is the co-director of two recent, celebrated films - NAZA and No Man’s Land - is more likely to skyrocket into the mainstream media realm (even if it is in the form of a controversy) than groundbreaking Palestinian filmmakers like Annemarie Jacir or Cherien Dabis. The New York Times is always a reliable testing ground: Only the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov was allowed to sound the alarm and use the word “genocide” in the pages of “the paper of record.” Pro-Palestine Jewish American writer-artist Molly Crabapple’s book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, was reviewed in the NYT but many Palestinian writers with the same exact politics and same level of talent are ignored. Meanwhile, multiple Palestinian human rights organizations and think tanks have documented torture and other atrocities in Israeli prisons, but the only report given mainstream media credibility is the one by B’Tselem: Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Jewish-American writer Peter Beinart was invited by talk show host Jon Stewart to discuss his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, but hardly any Palestinians have made it into Stewart’s studio. Talks, events and podcasts with outspoken figures like Normal Finkelstein, Gabor Maté and Francesca Albanese can rack up hundreds of thousands of views in minutes and command more attention than most Palestinian experts and intellectuals.

Examples abound, and as I accumulate them here, I want to be clear that I feel nothing but profound gratitude for all these writers, artists, thinkers and activists. Without a doubt, their contribution and fierce advocacy is indispensable to the cause of Palestinian liberation. Almost all of them have paid a heavy price for being outspoken, and continue to be harassed for their every move. It is the media ecosystem, and this strand within the public discourse that turns a deaf ear to Palestinian voices, that I want to place under the microscope.

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It became clear within days of the Hamas attacks of October 7th that Israel was going to brutally fast-track its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which has been going on for a century. Gaza had already been functioning as besieged enclave for many years by then, under an unrelenting blockade. The Israeli bombings and strikes after the attack were suddenly so numerous and shocking that many who had not engaged in these conversations before were suddenly pushed into thinking about it. And those who had always been part of advocating for Palestine had no choice but to take on the labor of informing and educating this curious but undecided sector as Israeli and Western propaganda against Palestinians hit an immediate pitch point. Doctored reports, a mass rape hoax, stories of beheaded babies, and an extraordinary revisionist history oozed out of newspapers, politicians, TV and social media accounts.

A reliable teaching tactic in those early days was asking the “undecided” to listen to or read what I will call “conversion narratives.” Recited by someone of Jewish faith, or from someone who grew up in Israel, these spoke of an early indoctrination into the Zionist project and how much they initially believed in Israel. But over time, either through a singular incident of awakening, or through a phase of learning against the grain, these figures converted to sympathy with the Palestinian cause. They finally understood the harm that Israel was doing to Palestinians, historically and now. They were just like you - but now, they have converted to the other side. These narratives often emphasized that becoming anti-Israel or anti-zionist did not mean giving up on being Jewish.

Another narrative that served as a teaching tactic, but also functioned as a declaration, was referred to as “Not in my name.” Reminding the undecided ones about the particular Jewish responsibility as survivors of the Holocaust, these stories insisted that the Jewish community must resist a genocide taking place in their name, and that the history of the Holocaust must not be appropriated to justify Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Not in my name” became a declarative hashtag and continues to be seen on posters in pro-Palestinian protests.

Palestinians, meanwhile, began to document the genocide on social media. Palestinian journalists, health workers, writers and scholars offered political analyses, historical explainers and poignant correctives to Western reporting and Israeli propaganda. These works were usually published by smaller indie platforms, or lived only on social media. It became clear quite quickly that powerful mainstream media would only repeat Israeli propaganda, and sometimes simply cut and paste IDF press releases. Somewhat bigger Arab or Arab-adjacent, English-language news outlets like Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye or Middle East Monitor were dedicated to reporting on Gaza, and many viewers came to rely on a handful of these organizations for transmitting Palestinian voices. A few progressive Western outlets like Democracy Now and Mondoweiss also became trusted sources that carried Palestinian perspectives and voices.

I noticed yet another strange trend when it came to sharing Palestine-related news and articles with friends, family or on one’s private social media accounts. Many would insist on only sharing or forwarding coverage from non-Arab sources which left them with places like Democracy Now or Mondoweiss, anti-zionist Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace or Jewish Currents, or the occasional mainstream media op-ed on Gaza. Articles from the English-language, liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz also saw a huge spike in viewership and sharing. The logic was simple: sharing articles that did not have an Arab, Muslim or Palestinian stamp was more conducive to converting an undecided Western person to understanding and empathizing with Palestinian suffering.

Jewish supremacy and white supremacy are building blocks of the Zionist settler state of Israel, and European and North American allies are precisely invested in upholding these ideologies. Voices that emerge from within the heart of this project play an important role in dismantling it; especially those stories that can offer insights into why they were captivated by it all and what brought about a change of heart. There are historical precedents. American soldier narratives that spoke out against the Vietnam war were instrumental in causing a shift in public opinion. Robin DeAngelo’s book White Fragility was published in 2018, but became a phenomenal success after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. A white author’s book that speaks honestly about her own race privilege played a key role in white America’s reckoning with anti-Blackness despite a hundreds of years of Black writers calling out structural racism in American life.

When it comes to Palestine, the battle lines have become clearer over the last three years, but a preoccupation with the converted and progressive perpetrator story is still very much in play. It is a logic that does not fail to confound me. Jewish, white and Western perspectives are seen as impartial and rational, whereas Palestinian or Arab perspectives, especially dispatches from the ground, are considered biased. Palestinians cannot see anything but their own experience. Palestinians cannot see both sides of this complex conflict. Palestinians cannot articulate it without getting too emotional. Palestinians have too much at stake in the narrative they are recounting. And even if every single allegation is true, it is incomprehensible to me why that would be grounds to dismiss Palestinian voices. The extraordinary reserve of racism and Islamophobia at the core of these assumptions has been honed over centuries, and not even a genocide seems to be changing that.

As Palestinians contend with their own extermination, it is no surprise that their voices have gotten louder. Yet, the big mainstream coverage, big events and big podcasts are reserved for those who are not Palestinian. When it comes to awards and acclaim, the West rewards very little that is produced by Palestinians. Sadly, this is apparent even on a smaller scale. The Palestine Book Awards is in its tenth year and awards books about Palestine written in English. They have received an astounding 80-plus book submissions, but their shortlist features very few Palestinians. This proves that English-language book publishing about Palestine is on the rise and is potentially even profitable - so long as it is not dominated by Palestinians.

In 1988, theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote an essay that resonated across several academic fields from history to literature to anthropology. Titled “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak asked why the subaltern—a marginalized and oppressed person or group excluded from circuits of power—is unable to represent themselves or speak up. This is because, even they do, their voices are mitigated and diluted to the point of erasure, and the subaltern is thus cast out of history itself. Spivak doomfully concludes that the subaltern cannot speak but she never claims that the subaltern does not have the ability to speak. Speaking is rendered futile without a listener. Thus the blame has always been pointed at the listener, and even more so at the wilfully deaf who actively refuse to hear.

Palestinians are speaking more than ever, but a determined refusal to listen to them still remains the norm. The cost of the West’s wilful deafness is extremely high - literally a matter of life and death for Palestinians. Palestinian intellectual Edward Said explained it perfectly: “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”

Love and solidarity❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

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In the last three years of genocide in Gaza, 95% of its universities have been deliberately blown up. UNESCO presented a comprehensive assessment: 22 campuses out of 38 are completely destroyed, and 1,112 staff members (including 345 female staff) have been killed, detained, or injured.1 It is no surprise that this US-Israeli violence has boomeranged back onto American campuses. It started with the high-profile Congressional hearings in December 2023, in which several leading university leaders got raps on their knuckles for alleged antisemitism, even as the real price was paid by several brilliant, pro-Palestinian faculty who were surveilled, targeted, maligned, and even lost their jobs.

A few months later, student revolts began and encampments sprang up across 60 American campuses, eventually spreading to Canada, the UK, Europe and Australia. Thousands of students were beaten, assaulted and arrested as police were given a carte blanche by university administrators. Countless undergraduates and graduate students had their degrees withheld or their visas canceled, and some were even expelled. This savage attack on academia was abetted by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and laid the groundwork for Trump to come in and decimate whatever semblance of dignity that American universities might have retained.

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The student protests exposed universities as glorified hedge funds with investments in weapons-related industries directly tied to the slaughter of people, in Gaza and elsewhere. Not only were universities’ hands dirtier than was previously known, but the clamping down on protests drew back the curtain on the ways in which education and curriculum had been manipulated to serve American empire. Professors, scholars, programs, events, syllabi and entire departments were persecuted and shut down as retribution for the faintest whiff of Palestinian solidarity. Soon, international students were being denied visas en masse and campuses turned into stomping grounds for ICE militias. Everything is now tainted: the idyllic American campus with its freshly cut lawns, the array of exciting majors, the shine of Ivy League prestige, and all that upright talk of free speech, diversity, anti-racism and other lofty notions that accompanies higher education. Several people I have spoken to recently are feeling a real sense of despair as their kids come of college age. Those who don’t live in the US but had harboured hopes to send their kids to US universities have decided against it. It is, in their minds, simply too dangerous.

But the unraveling of American universities has been a long time coming. Various scholars and historians will point to different points of origin, but my understanding of what went wrong begins with the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. Universities became active participants in the Cold War and poured huge sums into the research and development of innovative, barbaric weaponry. Academics were thrown into witch-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy’s line of fire. Various area studies units operated as surveillance outposts across Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Student unions and student protests were regularly infiltrated. And with the onset of the Vietnam anti-war protests, students were actually killed on campus. I wrote about the Cold War universities, and specifically about the role of English departments in all of this, in my book, Cold War Assemblages; Decolonization to Digital (2019), but I was only led to research this history because of everything I personally experienced after 9/11.

The events of 9/11 coincided with the start of my PhD in Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. Within days of the attacks, I encountered all kinds of racism from strangers that I could brush off. What shocked me especially were the kinds of things some of my grad school professors were saying. At one professor’s fancy Manhattan penthouse gathering for my cohort, a group of literature professors spoke passionately about how Afghanistan had to be nuked. Soon, this open prejudice and bloodlust for Muslims began to flow into the coursework and curricula. Many of us were discouraged from pursuing certain topics, or told that our credits for Middle Eastern literature courses would not count towards the degree. Outrageous comments were often made in class about Muslim philosophers, writers and scholars.

Within a month of 9/11, the US government signed in The Patriot Act, which meant anything and everything, it seemed, could be construed as terrorist activity. At universities, libraries flagged anyone checking out “suspicious” books, and organizations like Campus Watch sprang up, encouraging students to spy on scholars and professors of Middle East studies, while all kinds of dossiers on students and professors were compiled. Everything seemed in turmoil as the US beat the drums of war and prepared to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

It has taken me years to unpack and process just how much damage was done to American universities during those post-9/11 years. My trip down memory lane was precipitated by the 25-year commemoration of 9/11 and a conversation with my dear friend Zohra Saed, who bore the brunt of that day over the years that followed simply because she was Afghan-American. On the one hand, she experienced racism and hostility, but on the other, she was targeted for lucrative offers by the US government to go to Afghanistan under the guise of helping, while in reality, the job would have been to embed herself in the heart of empire and become a collaborator in what she calls “the bait and switch scam of Afghanistan.” Here’s our lovely conversation:

As we watch American universities on the brink of ruin today, capitulating to power and laying prostrate before a corrupt government, the political spinelessness, and the desire to self-sabotage is shocking. The echoes from those 9/11 days are resounding. The seeds were sown a long time ago but they were really nourished after 9/11 and today, we can see how poisonous the fruits are.

Talking to Zohra reminded me that even as so much came undone, we collectively built so much too. Many of my conversations from the last year highlight this worldmaking project especially as discontent with American academia only grows. I have organized these conversations and articles in a section called Undisciplined: Notes on Carceral Academia. It features interviews with Huda Fakhreddine, Maura Finkelstein, Ammiel Alcalay and Sara Ahmed but also my longer article on UConn where I worked as tenured faculty for over a decade until I was pushed out.

There is, without doubt, plenty to feel wretched about especially as Palestinians continue to be slaughtered everyday while news of US sending Israel 2000-pound bombs lights up our screens. But it is still a monumental development that we can see everything laid out so clearly. Palestine is not only a litmus test anymore, it is more like an X-ray that is showing us the insides of the beast.

Love and solidarity❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

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There were no omens that could have prepared us for how a bright and beautiful New York City morning back in 2001 was to plunge our world into a volcano of violence. A horrific attack in one of the busiest, most bustling cities in the world gave fiat for two decades of a vengeful and savage War on Terror all across the Muslim world. We lost and we lost some more: lives, bodies, dignity, rights, voice, beauty and freedom.

As many will say, including myself, 9/11 was a defining moment for our time. But just as we reach into the past to understand our present moment marked by fascism, genocide, hatred, vigilante militias, an escalation in every form of prejudice and phobia, and an irreparable rupture from humanness, so we must stretch back into a time before September 11, 2001 to ask what brought us here: that inconvenient before.

In a quest to seek this elusive before, we must also search within ourselves. I am reminded of a brilliant piece of writing by Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović in his collection Sarajevo Blues. In this lyrical wartime vignette called “Innocent Civilians,” and translated by Ammiel Alcalay, the poet spots a fashionable young woman with a “freshly bathed dalmation trotting over the crushed cement and broken windows.” Astounded by her casual joy as shells fall all around them, the narrator catches himself as he is about to declare her an innocent civilian.

“Of course she’s an innocent civilian, but not all civilians are innocent. There are those who, like retired couples, go out hand in hand for an evening walk in the middle of a war that they inspired, the course of its future in their heads. Of course, this business about civilians can get very complicated. You might run into a soldier pointing at the tip of his sneaker and the coagulated blood there that once belonged to a professor who thought that five thousand Muslim kids ought to be killed.”

Today might be a good day as any other to ask if we are indeed innocent at all, if we have earned an exemption from blame in breaking apart our world. With the ongoing and unstoppable genocide in Gaza, the word “complicit” circulates: complicit media, complicit liberals, complicit governments, complicit universities, complicit businesses, complicit entertainment…but also, complicit me and complicit you. If we see ourselves belonging to this world and if these daily happenings distress us, it is time to reflect more and to resist more.

Recently, with the 25 years of 9/11 looming over us, we reflected collectively on the things we lost and the things we still carry. We organized a beautiful evening with Mohamedou Ould Slahi.

Few people have had to think about the legacy of 9/11 as deeply, or as urgently, as Mohamedou who spent 15 years as a prisoner at the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay. It was revealed that he had been subjected to “Special Programs” at Guantánamo, which amounted to a diet of torture at the hands of US servicemen and women, including sexual abuse, beating, near-drowning, stimulus deprivation, and plenty else. He sat down with Michael Bronner, journalist and screenwriter, who adapted Mohamedou’s Guantánamo Diary to film for a charged conversation about the path we’ve all been on as individuals, nations and a fractious global community since that awful day 25 years ago. But Mohamedou also about love, hope and forgiveness.

I invited my dear friend Zohra Saed to join me on the Radical Futures podcast. Zohra and I were both starting out in the doctoral program at the City University of New York located on 34th street in midtown Manhattan.

As I walked up Broadway, I saw the second plane hit the tower. The crowd gasped loudly and phones rang incessantly as I kept walking till I found myself in a small huddle of people outside the university building. We all stared up at the Empire State Building and wondered what awaited us. Zohra too had made her to the same building and had been subjected to a racist attack almost immediately by an older woman who will likely enter history as an innocent civilian. An Afghan-American who was already teaching Arab-American literature, Zohra was repeatedly asked that day if she was somehow responsible for the attacks. If you had Afghan heritage as Zohra did, the rest is literally history.

In this conversation, she speaks about how Afghanistan turned into a US-sponsored scam as Afghan-American youth were seduced by the American government with lucrative offers to go and fix the very country they went on to break for 20 straight years. Zohra recounts what was done and undone by 9/11 and by the War on Terror, the ways in which these tragedies also led to building new worlds and new collectives, and shares her own trajectory as a poet, publisher and a scholar of Central Asia.

Love and solidarity❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

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Few people we know have had to think about the legacy of 9/11 as deeply, or as urgently, as Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Born in Mauritania, educated in Germany, Mohamedou spent 15 years as a prisoner at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, six of those long years after a US federal judge ordered him released after reviewing all the US government's classified "evidence" against him and concluding it amounted to nothing at all that justified holding him. Mohamedou, it was revealed, had been subjected to "Special Programs" at Guantánamo, which amounted to a diet of torture at the hands of US servicemen and women, including sexual abuse, beating, near-drowning, stimulus deprivation, and plenty else.

Rather than release him as the Court ordered, then-President Obama's Justice Department appealed, hence the extra years before he was eventually blindfolded, shackled, put on a military cargo planed and deposited home in Mauritania. Mohamedou wrote of his experiences while still in prison, material secreted out of the prison and ultimately published as Guantánamo Diary with the help of his lawyers, Nancy Hollander and Teri Duncan, and editor Larry Siems. The book was optioned for film before Mohamedou's release, and screenwriter/producer Michael Bronner, a long-time investigative journalist who had reported from Guantánamo, flew to Nouakchott to begin working with Mohamedou only days after his release, the beginning of a deep and inspiring friendship that endures to date.

For Bronner, the opening of the military prison marked a perilous abandonment of the rule of law on behalf of the United States and its allies, a reality brought to life in the movie that followed - The Mauritanian, starring Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch, and a brilliant Tahar Rahim as Mohamedou.

Michael and Mohamedou sat down for a conversation in Paris - joined by a wonderful audience of writers, editors, filmmakers, lawyers, journalists and friends - for a charged conversation about the path we've all been on as individuals, nations and a fractious global community since that awful day 25 years ago.

Many thanks to participants Olivia Snaije, Madhuri Sastry, Emmanuel Dongala, Lucy Mushita, Bassem Snaije, Anil Vassanji, Aurelie Daher, Khaled Al-Yemeni, Jerome Tubiana, Vivienne Walt, Jeff Schaeffer, Adrian Blundell-Wignall, Janine di Giovanni, Ken Roth and Melissa Thackaway.

Filming and editing by Hassane Mezine
Produced by Bhakti Shringarpure

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“You had to go and perform Afghan-ness,” scholar and poet Zohra Saed recalls as she speaks of the scary and difficult days soon after the towers fell in New York City. Afghanistan was suddenly in the spotlight as the location of 9/11 mastermind and head of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden.

On the one hand, there were drums of war, boycotts of Afghan businesses, and violence towards Afghans in the US. But on the other hand, soft imperialism was in immediate motion as numerous cultural interventions began springing up. Afghan-American youth were being recruited by the US government for a suite of programs including language acquisition, visits to Afghanistan, starting a career as a journalist, or humanitarian work. All this was done under the guise of rescuing Afghan culture and saving Afghan women from the Taliban. There was a caveat: participants would often have to work alongside the American military. At the time, young people like herself were to become the “bridge generation” that would return to rebuild Afghanistan and bring democracy back. Instead, these returnees “became complicit in a lot of the corruption.” Zohra would come to refer to it as “a circus or like a masquerade of what Afghan-ness is.”

Even as Zohra found herself in these settings and got lucrative offers to be part of various American programs, she chose to become a keen observer of the phenomenon. and honed a sharp critique of US imperialism. Despite a resistance to perform her Afghan identity for the West, Zohra admits that these unfolding events and eventually, the US invasion of Afghanistan, was instrumental in shaping her trajectory as a thinker, poet, teacher and activist. She also became a tireless advocate for the victims of a horrific war and occupation that raged in Afghanistan right until 2021.

It is clear to Zohra that Afghanistan became a “bait and switch scam” where after two decades of promising democracy and freedom, Americans threw up their hands and resorted to hawkish Rudyard Kipling-like declarations that “Afghanistan can never be defeated.” And so, today, the Taliban carries on, stronger than ever, and empowered by foreign investments in what has been a horrific last five years.

In this intimate, powerful and honest conversation, Zohra recounts what was done and undone by 9/11 and by the War on Terror that blazed across the world for decades after, and ways in which these tragedies also led to building new worlds and new collectives. She is invigorated by working with archival material and remains committed to memory and heritage work focused on the Central Asia region through many exciting writing, editing, publishing and cooking projects.

Further reading:

Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan by Zohra Saed https://centerforthehumanities.org/product/langston-hughes-poems-photos-notebooks-from-turkestan/

One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature, edited by Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi https://www.uapress.com/product/one-story-thirty-stories/

Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power, edited by Wazhmah Osman and Robert D. Crews https://www.dukeupress.edu/decolonizing-afghanistan

UpSet Press https://upsetpress.org/

Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari.
Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes.
Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat

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Sacco admits that he began to clash with many of the existing principles of journalism early in his career. He had graduated with a degree in journalism from a university in the US and had begun following the coverage of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. As news of the massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps reached him, he had an epiphany: “I remember seeing the photographs and looking at all this, and the thought that came to my mind is, ‘Wait a minute, I thought the Palestinians were the terrorists.’” Surprised by his own realization, Sacco resolved to interrogate this assumption about Palestinians that seemed to always hang in the air. He found himself in the West Bank, and eventually in Gaza, and his experiences became the foundation for a longstanding relationship with the region.

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Along the way, Sacco blazed a trail with a new style of journalism: fusing cartoons with in-depth reportage and historical research. His first book Palestine: A Nation Occupied was published by Fantagraphic Books in 1993. Visually stunning, witty and incredibly moving, it was a groundbreaking for its commitment to detailed, on-the-ground reporting while offering a glimpse into a besieged community.

Sacco continued to report from war zones, and books on Palestine and Bosnia followed. He had grown up with parents who lived through heavy bombings during World War II in Malta, and their experiences of war and displacement have remained at the core of his work: “They lived under very desperate conditions, very little food. Malta was basically surrounded by German and Italian forces. They saw a lot and lived through a lot, and those are the stories I heard around the dinner table.” Perhaps this is also why engaging with history came naturally to Sacco.

He produced works on the 1956 massacres in Gaza (Footnotes in Gaza, 2009); a powerful book on poverty in the US in collaboration with Hedges (Days of Destructions, Days of Revolt, 2012); an account of the Dene community living in the subarctic Canadian Northwest Territories (Paying the Land, 2020); and a controversial work on the deadly sectarian violence in northern India in 2013 (Once and Future Riot, 2026).

This month, Sacco will publish his third long work on Palestine, titled Requiem for Gaza and co-authored again with Hedges. Distraught about the last two years of genocide, and with no real possibility of entering Gaza, Sacco and Hedges spoke with 29 families who had escaped to Egypt. In Gaza, “all means of life have been extinguished,” he said. “I mean, purposefully destroyed, not accidentally destroyed, but in many, many cases dynamited.”

In this conversation, Sacco opens up about a range of topics with charm and self-effacing humor : his journey as a self-taught cartoonist, how the subject might shape his drawing style, and his long historical works that take years to complete.

Love and solidarity❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

Further reading:
Requiem for Gaza by Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges, Fantagraphics, 2026.
https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/requiem-for-gaza

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Summer highlights from the Radical Books Collective

Joe Sacco admits that he began to clash with many of the existing principles of journalism early in his career. He had graduated with a degree in journalism from a university in the US and had begun following the coverage of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

As news of the massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps reached him, he had an epiphany: “I remember seeing the photographs and looking at all this, and the thought that came to my mind is, ‘Wait a minute, I thought the Palestinians were the terrorists.’” Surprised by his own realization, Sacco resolved to interrogate this assumption about Palestinians that seemed to always hang in the air. He found himself in the West Bank, and eventually in Gaza, and his experiences became the foundation for a longstanding relationship with the region.

Along the way, Sacco blazed a trail with a new style of journalism: fusing cartoons with in-depth reportage and historical research. His first book Palestine: A Nation Occupied was published by Fantagraphic Books in 1993. Visually stunning, witty and incredibly moving, it was a groundbreaking for its commitment to detailed, on-the-ground reporting while offering a glimpse into a besieged community.

Sacco continued to report from war zones, and books on Palestine and Bosnia followed. He had grown up with parents who lived through heavy bombings during World War II in Malta, and their experiences of war and displacement have remained at the core of his work: “They lived under very desperate conditions, very little food. Malta was basically surrounded by German and Italian forces. They saw a lot and lived through a lot, and those are the stories I heard around the dinner table.” Perhaps this is also why engaging with history came naturally to Sacco.

He produced works on the 1956 massacres in Gaza (Footnotes in Gaza, 2009); a powerful book on poverty in the US co-authored with Chris Hedges (Days of Destructions, Days of Revolt, 2012); an account of the Dene community living in the subarctic Canadian Northwest Territories (Paying the Land, 2020); and a controversial work on the deadly sectarian violence in northern India in 2013 (Once and Future Riot, 2026).

This month, Sacco will publish his third long work on Palestine, titled Requiem for Gaza and co-authored again with Chris Hedges. Distraught about the last two years of genocide, and with no real possibility of entering Gaza, Sacco and Hedges spoke with 29 families who had escaped to Egypt. In Gaza, “all means of life have been extinguished,” he said. “I mean, purposefully destroyed, not accidentally destroyed, but in many, many cases dynamited.”

In this Radical Futures conversation, Sacco opens up about a range of topics: his journey as a self-taught cartoonist; his long historical works that take years to complete; his first brush with censorship in India; and his disappointment with what journalism has become today.

Further reading:
Requiem for Gaza by Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges, Fantagraphics, 2026.
https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/requiem-for-gaza

Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari
Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes
Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat

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There has been a feeling of eerie calm. Not because there is actual calm in the world but because our shock sensors have dulled considerably over the last three years. It might be an overused line but it holds: this is the new normal. Horror upon horror piles up but visceral outrage feels distant for those of us not directly experiencing the violence. I mostly speak for myself and maybe some others who have admitted to a similar low lying sense of helpless resignation.

The last shock waves came when the US attacked Iran and killed hundreds of little schoolgirls. Nowadays we try to vaguely keep with a hawkish game of negotiations, memorandums and broken ceasefires.

The last shock waves came when ICE grabbed 5-year old Liam Ramos with a Spiderman backpack from his father’s arms and threw him into detention. It was soon after the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in the bright light of day.

The last shock waves came when the satellites captured the bloodied earth after the massacres in Sudan’s El Fasher.

The last shock waves came when Israel passed the mandatory death penalty for Palestinian prisoners, and reports of savage rape and torture in Israeli prisons was splashed across our screens.

The last shock waves came when Israel carried out a massacre in Lebanon and called it Operation Eternal Darkness. Over 360 people were killed, thousands injured.

Not much has changed. Today, US and Iran continue to trade deadly strikes. Settler terrorism in the West Bank has escalated. India’s youth have risen up against rightwing rule only to be disciplined with pellet guns and nail-infested batons. Thousands of people sheltering in Sudan’s El-Obeid are under threat of an impending massacre. People are dying in ICE detention and fatal shootings continue in the US as Trump’s mass deportations plan remains in place. The US blockade of Cuba has left millions without electricity, medical help and food. Over a thousand have been killed in Gaza since the supposed ceasefire.

The news gets worse and worse but the body has gotten used to it. The pain jolts have seized. The spasms of shock have receded. But this might be our turning point, our cue. There is a choice: become comfortably numb or become intellectually and politically heightened.

The leprosy of empire has spread through our world and we might feel overwhelmed with the ruins, decay, disease and death. But we cannot wait around to feel something. We need to start activating our brains and asking what we can actually do, however little and un-immediate it might seem. I always advocate for becoming foot soldiers in the war of the cultural narrative, and where we’re finally seeing some perceptible effects. An entire generation across the planet have wisened up to the horrors of capitalist tyranny everywhere thanks to the tireless work of independent media and publishing, the vociferous campaigning on social media, and the unofficial dissemination of information due to the sheer strength of connectivity and social networks. This is a significant victory yet the rotten and the cannibalistic remain in power.

It is time to take our individual part seriously but within a collective framework. Today, empire has laid its hands on AI and we are hurtling faster than ever towards catastrophe. Stop using ChatGPT and Claude and whatever other AI app. We are completely marinated in it without our consent and empire’s gluttony to invest in it should raise all our alarm bells. I like to think of using AI as littering. When we were told how bad it is to litter in public, we trained ourselves to stop. AI is literally littering our brains and our environment. It is directly helping in genocide. So why not stop.

There are lots of ways to move past resignation and numbness. We have to push ourselves. It is wonderful but not enough to read a book on your own and think that you’ve educated yourself. Find a way to engage, discuss and spread whatever knowledge you have gained. It is wonderful but not enough to boycott Israeli settler products or unsubscribe to the New York Times but even more important to become the killjoy who pokes at everyone within your reach to do the same. People are being slaughtered. Go and become unpopular by having the unpleasant conversations. It is the literal least you can do.

Love and solidarity❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

We have had a busy season at the Radical Books Collective with conversations that have centered anti-coloniality, queerness, Palestine and Sudan. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, we would appreciate your contribution.

In case you missed it👇🏾

1. Book Club: How To Date a Fanatic by Aruni Kashyap is a queer campus novel set against the backdrop of rising right-wing Hindu fanaticism in India.

2. Book Club: Homosexual Intifada, edited by Hannah Moushabeck and George Abraham, is a groundbreaking anthology of queer Palestinian writers.

3. Event: Alyson K. Spurgas, Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure unpack the dark side of wellness, self-care and yoga industries. It has never only been about Gwenicide(!).

4. Event: Aruni Kashyap, Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure discuss the moral and ethical dimensions of the rapidly increasing presence of AI, and ways in which it impacts reading, writing, publishing and teaching.

5. Book Club: At Sea by Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a workplace novel featuring a gritty Sudanese female protaganist who takes charge of an isolated offshore oil rig with an entirely male crew.

Aruni Kashyap in conversation with Bhakti Shringarpure about How To Date A Fanatic, queer campus novel about a group of characters whose lives are torn asunder by right-wing political violence in northern India.

Buy the book here.

About the book: In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval. As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men in the city, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country’s political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape. Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

Aruni Kashyap is a writer, translator, and academic. He is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and editor of the story collection How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency. He is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. Aruni is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Georgia (Athens).

Bhakti Shringarpure is the creative editor of the Radical Books Collective.

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Buy the book here

About the book: In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval. As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men in the city, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country’s political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape. Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

Aruni Kashyap is a writer, translator, and academic. He is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and editor of the story collection How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency. He is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. Aruni is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Georgia (Athens).

Bhakti Shringarpure is the creative editor of the Radical Books Collective.

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A powerful conversation about a groundbreaking anthology! Editors Hannah Moushabeck and George Abraham spoke with Bhakti Shringarpure about Homosexual Intifada, a powerful anthology spotlighting the voices of queer Palestinian writers from both the diaspora and homeland.

Buy the book here.

This first-of-its-kind collection features a dynamic range of LGBTQ+ Palestinian perspectives through deeply personal essays, short stories, poetry, comics, photo essays, and memoir. Centering queer Palestinian identity and experience, this essential volume explores themes of displacement, assimilation, belonging, and love across geographies—from Jerusalem and Ramallah to New York, Beirut, and beyond. These stories, often silenced or misrepresented in Western media, challenge false narratives, boldly reclaim agency, and dismantle stereotypes.

Contributors include celebrated and emerging queer Palestinian authors such as Noor Hindi, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Elias Jahshan, Randa Jarrar, and more. More than just a literary work, Homosexual Intifada is a radical act of visibility. It challenges the pinkwashing of queer identities in service of imperial agendas and affirms the existence, resilience, and diversity of LGBTQ+ Palestinians worldwide. This collection is a vital contribution to queer literature, Arab identity, and decolonial thought.

Hannah Moushabeck is a Palestinian American writer and book worker. She is the author of Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine and co-owner of Interlink Publishing, the only Palestinian-owned publishing company in the United States.

George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet and author of When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America and Birthright, as well as the co-editor of Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry.

Bhakti Shringarpure is the creative editor of the Radical Books Collective.

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This first-of-its-kind collection features a dynamic range of LGBTQ+ Palestinian perspectives through deeply personal essays, short stories, poetry, comics, photo essays, and memoir. Centering queer Palestinian identity and experience, this essential volume explores themes of displacement, assimilation, belonging, and love across geographies—from Jerusalem and Ramallah to New York, Beirut, and beyond. These stories, often silenced or misrepresented in Western media, challenge false narratives, boldly reclaim agency, and dismantle stereotypes.

Contributors include celebrated and emerging queer Palestinian authors such as Noor Hindi, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Elias Jahshan, Randa Jarrar, and more. More than just a literary work, Homosexual Intifada is a radical act of visibility. It challenges the pinkwashing of queer identities in service of imperial agendas and affirms the existence, resilience, and diversity of LGBTQ+ Palestinians worldwide. This collection is a vital contribution to queer literature, Arab identity, and decolonial thought.

Also available on YouTube!

About the editors
Hannah Moushabeck is a Palestinian American writer and book worker. She is the author of Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine and co-owner of Interlink Publishing, the only Palestinian-owned publishing company in the United States.

George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet and author of When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America and Birthright, as well as the co-editor of Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry.

About the moderator
Bhakti Shringarpure is the creative editor of the Radical Books Collective.

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Alyson K. Spurgas, Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure unpack the dark side of wellness, self-care and yoga industries.

Celebrity wellness influencer Gwenyth Paltrow recently shocked the world with an ad selling real estate in Israel even as the settler colonial state’s genocide of Palestinians is being documented in real time. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi instituted an International Yoga Day for the world while being engaged in fascism, censorship and violence towards Indian Muslims at home. Tradwife influencers stand for wholesome and healthy lifestyles alongside the notion that women should hark back to an idyllic time when white, Christian, male supremacy prevailed. There has been outrage about Israeli soldiers who spend their R&R traveling around India pursuing meditation, wellness and spirituality after committing genocide at home. The global wellness industry is priced at $6.8 trillion having doubled in size from just a decade ago. It is a big dirty business and this conversation unpacks it’s complicity with racism, fascism, patriarchy and violence. The hosts discuss these issues at length and ask we pay heed to Audre Lorde’s famous comment on self-care that has been misused in the last many years: ““Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Watch here!

References:
Decolonize Self-Care by Alyson K. Spurgas and Zoe Meleo-Erwin: https://orbooks.com/catalog/decolonize-self-care/

“Notes of an Ambivalent Yogi” by Bhakti Shringarpire https://evergreenreview.com/read/notes-of-an-ambivalent-yogi/

“Hindutva Gets Sugarcoated Through Pop Culture Sensations While Fascism Continues Its Rise” by Madhuri Sastry https://wyvarchive.com/hindutva-gets-sugarcoated-through-pop-culture-sensations-while-fascism-continues-its-rise/

From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures by Lara Sheehi https://www.plutobooks.com/product/from-the-clinic-to-the-streets/

Omwashing Yoga: Weaponized Spirituality in India, Israel, and the US by Sheena Sood https://sheenashining.com/

Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post-9/11 America by Nadia Abu El Haj https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/994-combat-trauma

L’Oreal: Makeup for Israeli Apartheid! https://bdsmovement.net/news/l%25E2%2580%2599oreal-makeup-israeli-apartheid-0

Alyson K. Spurgas is writer, researcher and Associate Professor of Sociology at Trinity College (Hartford). She is the author of Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century (2020) and the co-author of Decolonize Self-Care (2022).

Madhuri Sastry is a writer and editor with a background in human rights law. She is the Culture Editor at The Polis Project and has written for Bitch Media, Slate, Catapult and Guernica, among several other publications.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and creative director of the Radical Books Collective.

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Aruni Kashyap, Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure discuss the rapidly increasing presence of AI which is causing a cognitive vertigo. Love it, hate it, need it or resist it, there is no denying that the pervasive presence of AI in all aspects of life has caused an upheaval. It is easy to denounce the use of AI in technologies of warfare and to rail against the environmentally disastrous AI data centers but when it comes to the worlds of research and creativity, the lines blur rather too quickly. Even as Google or Siri or Alexa are integrated into our lives, is it wrong to have ChatGPT or Claude take our projects a few steps further? How far is too far? Do you even recall consenting to this technology on our phones, cars, homes and computers? At the Radical Books Collective, we are concerned with how AI impacts reading, writing, publishing and pedagogy but more importantly, we want to engage with its moral and ethical dimensions. We may not have answers or solutions but we will ask the right questions.

Aruni Kashyap is a writer, translator, and academic. He is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and the forthcoming How to Date a Fanatic. He has edited the story collection How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency and is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. He is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Georgia (Athens).

Madhuri Sastry is a writer and editor with a background in human rights law. She is the Culture Editor at The Polis Project and has written for Bitch Media, Slate, Catapult and Guernica, among several other publications.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and creative director of the Radical Books Collective.

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Also on YouTube

Aruni Kashyap is a writer, translator, and academic. He is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and the forthcoming How to Date a Fanatic. He has edited the story collection How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency and is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. He is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Georgia (Athens).

Madhuri Sastry is a writer and editor with a background in human rights law. She is the Culture Editor at The Polis Project and has written for Bitch Media, Slate, Catapult and Guernica, among several other publications.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and creative director of the Radical Books Collective. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: From Decolonization to Digital and the forthcoming Leila Aboulela: Writing as Refuge. She produces and hosts the Radical Futures podcast.

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Previous Book Clubs and Events

Celebrity wellness influencer Gwenyth Paltrow recently shocked the world with an ad selling real estate in Israel even as the settler colonial state’s genocide of Palestinians is being documented in real time. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi instituted an International Yoga Day for the world while being engaged in fascism, censorship and violence towards Indian Muslims at home. Tradwife influencers stand for wholesome and healthy lifestyles alongside the notion that women should hark back to an idyllic time when white, Christian, male supremacy prevailed. There has been outrage about Israeli soldiers who spend their R&R traveling around India pursuing meditation, wellness and spirituality after committing genocide at home. The global wellness industry is priced at $6.8 trillion having doubled in size from just a decade ago. It is a big dirty business and this conversation unpacks it’s complicity with racism, fascism, patriarchy and violence.

Join Alyson K. Spurgas, Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure on Wednesday, July 8th, 12pm New York, 7pm Paris. Event will be livestreamed on Substack, YouTube and X. Set a reminder below to join:

Alyson K. Spurgas is writer, researcher and Associate Professor of Sociology at Trinity College (Hartford). She is the author of Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century (2020) and the co-author of Decolonize Self-Care (2022).

Madhuri Sastry is a writer and editor with a background in human rights law. She is the Culture Editor at The Polis Project and has written for Bitch Media, Slate, Catapult and Guernica, among several other publications.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and creative director of the Radical Books Collective. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: From Decolonization to Digital and the forthcoming Leila Aboulela: Writing as Refuge.

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A conversation between Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Bhakti Shringarpure about her novel At Sea.

Buy the book here.

Watch on YouTube

At Sea is propulsive novel of ambition, greed, and the deadly fury of Mother Nature, as a female driller takes charge of an isolated offshore oil rig with an entirely male crew. When Zainab, an expert driller, is tasked with overseeing a high-stakes oil rig operation, she leaves behind her pregnant sister to embark on the most challenging assignment of her career. But there’s a catch. The rig is teetering on the edge of disaster—and Zainab is the only woman among a crew of hardened men who want absolutely nothing to do with her. At the helm, but forced to prove herself at every turn, Zainab investigates the issues that have plagued the operation. When all her warnings are ignored, she quickly grasps that the real danger may lie in the cold calculations and base desires of the men determined to finish the operation as quickly and cheaply as possible. As tensions rise and secrets unravel, Zainab races to prevent the looming catastrophe that threatens the rig, the lives of the crew and the welfare of the sea before it’s too late.

About the author: Born in Sudan, Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s first job as a teenager was in a coal mine in rural Australia. After graduating with first-class honours in Mechanical Engineering, Abdel-Magied trained and worked as an MWD (Measurement While Drilling) contractor and drilling engineer. She is a also screenwriter and award-winning social advocate. Abdel-Magied’s debut literary novel At Sea was a Dua lipa Service95 ‘Must Read’ for 2026. Previous titles include action packed teen fantasy Silverbrook: Yumna and the Golden Horse, the essay collection Talking About A Revolution and two novels for younger readers, You Must Be Layla and the award-winning Listen, Layla. She is currently a writer on British continuing drama Emmerdale and her original drama series Cruise Control is in development with the BBC. Abdel-Magied is the creator of Keep Eyes on Sudan and adviser on the Sudan Digital Archive. She is dedicated to the civilian movement in Sudan and the celebration and amplification of Sudanese culture. Follow her on Instagram and on Good Chat with Yassmin Abdel-Magied on Substack.

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Buy the book here.

About the novel
At Sea is propulsive novel of ambition, greed, and the deadly fury of Mother Nature, as a female driller takes charge of an isolated offshore oil rig with an entirely male crew. When Zainab, an expert driller, is tasked with overseeing a high-stakes oil rig operation, she leaves behind her pregnant sister to embark on the most challenging assignment of her career. But there’s a catch. The rig is teetering on the edge of disaster—and Zainab is the only woman among a crew of hardened men who want absolutely nothing to do with her. At the helm, but forced to prove herself at every turn, Zainab investigates the issues that have plagued the operation. When all her warnings are ignored, she quickly grasps that the real danger may lie in the cold calculations and base desires of the men determined to finish the operation as quickly and cheaply as possible. As tensions rise and secrets unravel, Zainab races to prevent the looming catastrophe that threatens the rig, the lives of the crew and the welfare of the sea before it’s too late.

About the author
Born in Sudan, Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s first job as a teenager was in a coal mine in rural Australia. After graduating with first-class honours in Mechanical Engineering, Abdel-Magied trained and worked as an MWD (Measurement While Drilling) contractor and drilling engineer. She is a also screenwriter and award-winning social advocate. Abdel-Magied’s debut literary novel At Sea was a Dua lipa Service95 ‘Must Read’ for 2026. Previous titles include action packed teen fantasy Silverbrook: Yumna and the Golden Horse, the essay collection Talking About A Revolution and two novels for younger readers, You Must Be Layla and the award-winning Listen, Layla. She is currently a writer on British continuing drama Emmerdale and her original drama series Cruise Control is in development with the BBC. Abdel-Magied is the creator of Keep Eyes on Sudan and adviser on the Sudan Digital Archive. She is dedicated to the civilian movement in Sudan and the celebration and amplification of Sudanese culture. Follow her on Instagram and on Good Chat with Yassmin Abdel-Magied on Substack.

About the moderator
Bhakti Shringarpure is the founder and creative director of the Radical Books Collective.

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A live book club chat about The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World (Haymarket Books, 2026) by Vicky Osterweil. Moderated by Sherry Zane.

About the book: A provocative history of Disney’s rise to cultural dominance, pulling skeletons from the corporate closet to decode the political messages hidden in all of your favorite childhood movies. In The Extended Universe, Vicky Osterweil takes us on a quest to discover how Disney’s “imagineers” have made it impossible to reflect on the wonders of growing up without thinking of Disney’s movies, amusement parks, and merchandising. Drawing on extensive interviews with filmmakers, screenwriters, union organizers, and Disney “adults” alike, Osterweil unearths reactionary political commitments and maleficent legal maneuvers so cartoonishly evil they would make one of Walt’s own animated villains blush. Along the way, Osterweil braids together corporate skullduggery with a not entirely unsympathetic analysis of some of Disney’s most famous movies. The result is an entertaining and convincing case that Disney’s entire business model has been built upon a ruthless and fanatical insistence on intellectual property rights—from Steamboat Willie to Avengers: Infinity War and beyond! Buy the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2525-the-extended-universe

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About the author: Vicky Osterweil is a Philadelphia-based writer, agitator, and worker whose first book, In Defense of Looting, described historical struggles for liberation in the US. She is a member of the anarchist journal CAW and has written about the intersections of film, politics, and culture for publications such as The Paris Review, Art in America, Al Jazeera America, The Baffler, Dissent, Lux Magazine, and The New Inquiry, where she was also a culture editor for many years.

About the moderator: Sherry Zane is a historian, cultural critic and scholar whose research explores the intersection of visual culture, public memory, and feminist historiography. Her recent essay Michael Jackson, Palestine and the Erasure of Solidarity was published on Radical Books Collective. Her article “’I Did It for the Uplift of Humanity and the Navy’: Same-Sex Acts and the Origins of the National Security State, 1919–1921” was published in the New England Quarterly in 2018 and has since been featured in The MIT Press Reader and 19th News. She writes at The Lioness Archive substack:

The Lioness Archive’s Substack

Feminist Writings from a Canceled Academic

By Sherry Zane

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I am always ashamed when I mourn the destruction of monuments. How dare I indulge and grieve empty historical sites when actual human beings are being blown up into bits? All these questions surface as the weekend-long bombing of the 5000-year old city of Tyre in Lebanon has left ancient sites destroyed and several dozen dead.

Palestine’s greatest griot Mahmoud Darwish has a poem titled “The house murdered” (translated here by Fady Joudah) that reconciles the dilemma. Darwish contemplates the whole life of a house, a world that vanishes within one minute of a strike. It is a simple reversal of perspective. An attempt to contemplate life through objects that may seem lifeless. “In each thing there’s a being that aches...the memory of fingers, of a scent, of an image. And houses get murdered just as their residents get murdered. And as the memory of things get murdered—wood, stone, glass, iron, cement—they all scatter in fragments like beings.” We must seek meaning, memories, history, breath in these fragments.

Darwish makes a list of things that scatter, break, shard as a bomb bursts through: “And the lease contract, the marriage and birth certificates, the utility bills, identity cards, passports, love letters, all torn to shreds like the hearts of their owners. And the pictures fly, the toothbrushes, hair combs, make-up accessories, shoes, underwear, sheets, towels, like family secrets hung in public, in ruin.”

Everywhere we turn, a ruin.

Strikes on Qeshm and Goruk in Iran; strikes all over Lebanon; strikes as always in Gaza; Dutch police strike a pregnant Palestinian women; police strike and arrest over 700 people all over France for celebrating football match victory; German police draw guns at pro-Palestine protesters; police strike protesters outside an ICE detention center in New Jersey and a mayor imposes a curfew; police strike furious protesters who wanted bury their dead from Ebola in Democratic Republic of Congo; police strike anti-goverment protesters in La Paz, Bolivia, etc. Rinse and repeat.

Same news, different place. A world rising up. A world struck down.

I have nothing meaningful to say about what we can do anymore but I take solace in South African writer Sisonke Msimang’s words from almost a year ago: “The role of everybody is to be at the front lines of fighting for justice, right? There is a demand as a human being to show up in the world in particular ways, which is always difficult. It’s difficult in all times to show up with honesty and integrity in the world. And then in a time of genocide, it is more important than ever.”

The world is in a crisis so acute and so massive that every solution on the table and every strategy of resistance feels like we’re trying to put square pegs in round holes. The savagery and hatred at the core of all this is profound that there we are in a perennial state of cognitive vertigo. But we have to keep trying, we have to keep at it.

Love and solidarity❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

There has been a lot of activity at the Radical Books Collective. We’ve had so many wonderful guests and conversations. I’ve been terrible at sending out updates but please check these out!

—Two incredibly illuminating conversations on Sudan and Palestine, and the role of the media:

—Our Books Clubs are back and rolling! We had two conversations; one on the evils of Disney and another on forests in African novels: