Featuring journalists Ism’ail Kushkush and Raghdan Orsud. Even as Sudan enters the 4th year of devastating war, media coverage remains abysmal. Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure speak to two Sudanese journalists about why the deadliest conflict in the world has become the the casualty of today’s media attention economy.

Isma’il Kushkush is a journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Guernica, Nieman Reports, Columbia Journalism Review, Smithsonian, The Nation, the Associated Press and others. He was based in Khartoum, Sudan, for eight years, and has been acting bureau chief for the New York Times in East Africa. He was a Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and an Ida B. Wells Fellowship recipient with Type Investigations.

Raghdan Orsud is a digital ecosystems and media development specialist with 15+ years working at the intersection of technology, information integrity, and development programming. She’s built misinformation monitoring systems, designed digital initiatives for public-interest media, and advised organizations operating in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. As Co-founder of Beam Reports, she’s now channeling that expertise into building smarter tools for stronger information ecosystems.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Listen to previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.radicalbookscollective.com/s/its-not-you-its-the-media

Watch previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLstXMEF0r05bhdfv7yCt5V2KXTdK4cO5F

Buy the book here.
About the book
Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.

About the author
Ainehi Edoro is a Nigerian literary scholar who focuses on African literature and digital culture. She is the founding editor of Brittle Paper, a leading platform for African literary culture, and faculty of English and African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Buy the book here: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/forest-imaginaries/9780231565073

Join Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure for a live recording of It’s Not You, It’s The Media with guests Ism’ail Kushkush and Raghdan Orsud.

Thursday, May 14th, 12pm New York, 6pm Khartoum.

Event will be livestreamed online on Substack, YouTube and X. Set a reminder below to join:

Isma’il Kushkush is a journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Guernica, Nieman Reports, Columbia Journalism Review, Smithsonian, The Nation, Associated Press and others. He was based in Khartoum, Sudan, for eight years, and has been acting bureau chief for the New York Times in East Africa. He was a Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and an Ida B. Wells Fellowship recipient with Type Investigations.

Raghdan Orsud is a digital ecosystems and media development specialist with 15+ years working at the intersection of technology, information integrity, and development programming. She’s built misinformation monitoring systems, designed digital initiatives for public-interest media, and advised organizations operating in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. As Co-founder of Beam Reports, she’s now channeling that expertise into building smarter tools for stronger information ecosystems.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Listen to previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.radicalbookscollective.com/s/its-not-you-its-the-media

Watch previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLstXMEF0r05bhdfv7yCt5V2KXTdK4cO5F

Share

Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure speaking with guest Robin Andersen, author of The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza. (OR Books, 2025). They discuss why the media framing of October 7th narrative became pivotal to manufacture consent for the genocide in Gaza. Andersen explains that the New York Times, in particular, played an outsize role in framing this October 7th origin story. However, Andersen argues that this has led to the downfall of establishment media since popularity of Israel is at an all time low in the US. They also discuss the current media ecosystem, and the need to dismantle existing ways in which journalism is practiced.

Buy the book here: https://orbooks.com/catalog/the-complicit-lens/

“Gaming the Iran war and the Gaza Genocide Syndrome” by Robin Andersen https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/gaming-the-iran-war-and-the-gaza-genocide-syndrome/

Watch it here:

Listen to previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.radicalbookscollective.com/s/its-not-you-its-the-media

Watch previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLstXMEF0r05bhdfv7yCt5V2KXTdK4cO5F

Share

We get to know the young women —Deka, Hibo, and Asma—as they prepare for their high school exams, hang out together, and navigate romantic relationships. A core issue in the film is the class difference between the three friends, which will determine their life trajectories. One of them might be forced to get a job and give up on education altogether while the wealthy one is already planning to take off to university in Paris. The Franco-Somali film is set in a Muslim country, and cultural markers of Islam are part of the film’s universe.

The first time I taught this film, it was to a large lecture class of 200 students, and even though there was no real discussion time, some students commented on liking the film because the protagonists overcame oppressive Muslim traditions in an oppressive Muslim country. I was able to correct the students in person and remind them that this theme - or stereotype, really - does not exist in the film. If anything, the film ultimately explores universal challenges about girlhood and friendships across class differences while depicting risqué themes like a teen miscarriage and an affair with an older married man.

The next two times I taught Dhalinyaro, the film was assigned for online classes and I did not have the privilege of tackling these prejudices in person. Last year, for a short-answers assignment about the film, I noticed that several students responded by making up an alternate plot, insisting that these three women are depicted as overcoming oppression in their traditional Muslim society. One of them wrote about a wholly made-up character called “Fatima.”

Subscribe now

It was frustrating, but not shocking, because I am aware that Western society suffers from chronic levels of Islamophobia. Either Muslims are depicted as violent and extremist, or their women are in need of saving. In fact, savior narratives about Muslim women are ingrained in the West and Western media, blasted through news, films, books, and without a doubt, taught in schools and university classrooms, too.

During this academic year, I assigned Dhalinyaro again, and the responses to a similar short-answers assignment proved disastrous. In a class of 40 students, nine made up a character that did not exist in the film. This character had a very Somali name: Ifrah. Fourteen students fabricated the plot. Some wrote about protagonists having to choose an oppressive Muslim arranged marriage, while others wrote, as usual, about the women overcoming tradition and, yet again, oppression.

This time around, the culprit was obvious: AI. Even though this is an example of an “AI hallucination,” it was me who felt I was hallucinating. I came across Ifrah and the fabricated stereotypical plot so many times that I began to doubt that I might have missed something. It all sounded so believable. I felt like I was losing my mind and rewatched the film. I did not find Ifrah.

I am aware that the use of AI is common and widespread, and educators are fed up with seeing entire assignments written up by AI platforms. It has also been a bit sickening to see the extent to which educators themselves are being persuaded to use AI to generate assignments, lesson plans, lectures and so on. It’s a vicious loop. I have had a distance from academia over the past three years, and have been spared a lot of the institutional back and forth on this subject.

Yet another reason that I have not had to contend with AI is because I tend to teach works of literature and film that AI has not yet incorporated into its system. A mixed blessing, to say the least. And I learned this the hard way.

Several months ago, I used ChatGPT for the first time. I have been working on a biography of Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela, (forthcoming this September via Routledge) and as I rushed to write the final chapter, I could not remember a particular plot point in one of her novels. I asked ChatGPT a couple of different questions, and it did the same two things that my students must have encountered: It fabricated a character with a Muslim sounding name, and it also made an error in my plot question, telling me that this character went on to live in the novel even though I clearly recalled that he had died. I told ChatGPT that this character does not exist, and it told me that it was so sorry to disappoint me, adding that it will try harder in the future. Disarming and sweet. I fell for it. I let it go.

I would soon learn, however, that AI’s racism runs deeper.

A few weeks later, I was in discussions with the publisher about the cover image for my Leila Aboulela biography, and the series co-editor and friend, Lily Saint, texted me the art that she had generated on an AI platform while fiddling around for cover ideas. We could barely believe it.

The style of the head scarf and the darker skin AI selected for this depiction, I’ve learned, are typical features of how AI incorporates stereotypes of religion and race based, in this case, on the name only. But this made no sense to me, given that Aboulela is the author of several novels, and has been reviewed and profiled in multiple media outlets. Several dozen academic articles have been written about her, she has awards and booklist mentions, and has a strong presence in video and audio platforms. She is literally all over the Internet. All in English too. AI platforms, however, had not ingested any of this. And racist outputs run amok.

Racial capitalism is at the core of AI infrastructure. We have been hearing about how it’s having ruinous effects on the environment because AI data centers require billions of cubic liters of drinking water in order to cool the servers, and their carbon emissions levels are disastrous. And of course, these data centers are only built in poor neighborhoods.

My meagre experiments with AI have illustrated what many have told me: AI will grow so strong that one day, it will appear to have a mind of its own, but that for now, the logic is human: It mostly regurgitates what it has been fed.

AI thus becomes a reflection of all that is anti-Muslim in our culture —it is fed on media and art that are controlled by and favor white publications, white media perspectives, white visuals — so it is not wonder that it repackages and vomits up those precise racist perspectives. As we contend with monstrous levels of anti-Muslim hatred in the world today, it is no surprise that the AI we get in the Western world is also Islamophobic.

Love and solidarity❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

Leave a comment

Book Clubs are back!

Share

Share

…And, in case you missed it!

Join Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure for a live recording of It’s Not You, It’s The Media with guest Robin Andersen, author of The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza. (OR Books, 2025).

Buy the book here.

Event will be livestreamed on Substack, YouTube and X on May 7, 2026 at 1pm EST. Set a reminder below to join.

This event has ended. Please watch the recording below:

About the book
This vitally necessary and carefully researched book examines the way US establishment media ran interference for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, aligning its coverage with Israeli military narratives whilst downplaying, and even condoning, the wholesale massacre of Palestinians. Commencing with the October 7, 2023, attack, The Complicit Lens scrutinizes mainstream journalism, contrasting it with social media reports and international news coverage. It reveals how legacy media presented Israeli violence as defensive and justified, casting doubt on IDF bombings, employing passive language to deflect blame for atrocities, and repeating Israeli talking points, often word-for-word. Andersen documents the targeting of journalists and aid workers in what has become the deadliest conflict for each on record. She spotlights the editorial censorship that prohibited the use of terms such as “genocide” and “massacre” in the reporting of Palestinian deaths. And, as global protests against the Gaza genocide gathered strength, she examines the hostile media portrayal of these uprisings, particularly those led by young people and Jewish organizations. (Co-published with the Institute for Palestine Studies).

About the author
Robin Andersen is professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University and an award-winning author of a dozen single- and co-authored books. Her work examines film, television, and media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. She edits the Routledge Focus Book Series on Media and Humanitarian Action, serves as a Project Censored Judge, and contributes to the annual State of the Free Press. Andersen is on the Board of Directors of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), where she also writes regularly, and is an Izzy Award Judge for the Park Center for Independent Media. Her writing has appeared in CounterPunch, LA Progressive, The Progressive, Salon, Common Dreams, and ScheerPost, among others.

Listen to previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.radicalbookscollective.com/s/its-not-you-its-the-media

Watch previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLstXMEF0r05bhdfv7yCt5V2KXTdK4cO5F

Share

Listen to previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.radicalbookscollective.com/s/its-not-you-its-the-media

Watch previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLstXMEF0r05bhdfv7yCt5V2KXTdK4cO5F

Share

When a group of students and feminist faculty collectively complained about sexual harassment at their institution - Goldsmiths, University of London - a suite of deflective actions from the university ensured that the complaint never saw light of day and that the harassers stayed protected. In what became a long, drawn out battle against the institution, Ahmed fiercely advocated for all those who complained, and eventually blew the whistle on the university. The atmosphere turned so hostile and abusive towards her that it became untenable to work there, and Ahmed resigned.

When the resignation became public and the practices of the university were exposed, Ahmed was flooded with stories from all over the world. People wrote to her sharing that they had gone through something similar: They had been harassed, their complaints had been blocked, and some had even lost their jobs. “And that’s actually what enabled the research,” Ahmed explains.

Listen to the podcast here.

“It was the kind of connections that are possible when we disclose information that professionalism tells us to keep hidden.” Saying “No” to her institution allowed Ahmed “to be part of a political movement that was not bound by one specific institution, but was actually thinking about what are these structural problems that are not being dealt with.”

Ahmed’s book, NO! The Art and Activism of Complaining, published by Feminist Press (New York, 2026) is an astounding analytical work that exposes the deep rot within institutions of all types. Workplaces in most professions are hotbeds of injustice and oppression, and disproportionately impact women, queer and trans people, people of color, and people with disabilities. NO! emerges from research compiled over several years, as people began telling Ahmed their stories of sexual harassment, racism, sexism, transphobia and ableism in the workplace. Ahmed became a friend, teacher, parent, activist, therapist and scholar all rolled into one, and cultivated what she calls a “feminist ear” in order to listen to and learn from grievances, reports and complaints.

Institutional violence, Ahmed found, was a structure not an event, and is continually replicated by those in power in order to keep themselves in power. The complaint can be one way in which this unchecked power can be disrupted, exposed, and sometimes even ruptured. In NO! Ahmed offers an anatomy of a complaint: what happens when it’s made, how it travels within the system, which complaint is repressed and which is quickly resolved, who complies, who resists, who benefits, and who is cast out.

Ahmed believes that it is nearly impossible for an official complaint to ever become a vehicle for justice, but it is the act of complaining that is ultimately invaluable. The complaint itself, and the solidarities that emerge when a complaint is out there, becomes a tool for power mapping; a means of understanding exactly where power lies, who holds it, and how it moves. Along the way, it exposes the administrators who are invested in preserving the status quo despite pretending to care about helping the person being harassed.

Share

In this wide-ranging conversation, Ahmed discusses the art and activism of complaining by taking apart the nuts and bolts of workplace culture that purports to do one thing, but often does the exact opposite. She interrogates the nature of professionalism, the push for confidentiality, the culture of open secrets, hollow (non) performative gestures, the faux interest in diversity, gender and disability justice, and the institutional gaslighting of the persons who complain about being harassed. In fact, the last years of genocide in Palestine have proven just how low institutions have sunk. Complaints have been manufactured in order to justify the disciplining, harassment and the firing of people who have been outspoken about Palestine.

“So I think that everything you do because you do not believe that it is okay to genocide a people can be used against you,” Ahmed says. “The very language of oppression can be used against you. The very language of being a victim can be used against you. Identity politics can be used against you. Universalism can be used against you. Anything can be used against you.”

Ahmed thinks it’s time to get louder and more creative. This might mean turning your complaint into a placard or a prayer or a poster, or even a post-it, where it can be seen. Complaints may not become instruments of justice, but they can be deployed to raise consciousness.

“We’re in a time of grotesque imperial wars,” Ahmed says. “We have to keep complaining and keep protesting.”

And on a personal note, it was an honor to speak with Ahmed who work has been foundational for me. I am grateful for revolutionary, resistant and deeply generative concepts she has brought into the world and for her tireless work to ensure that those being crushed by institutions are seen, heard and feel empowered.

Buy NO! The Art and Activism of Complaining here: https://feministpress.org/products/9781558613683-no

Love and solidarity❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

Recent publications and upcoming events on the Radical Books Collective

1) Join us for a livestream on Tuesday, April 21st at 1pm EST titled “Good Wife, Bad Wife: Jackie, Diana, Michelle, Meghan, Rama, Melania...” We ask: whether its adoration or demonization, why is the media obsessed with the wives?

2) A conversation with scholar and editor Nikhil Pandhi about his book Love in a Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist Anthology of Love Stories. Listen here or watch below👇🏾

3) A conversation with writer Tareq Baconi about his queer, Palestinian memoir Fire in Every Direction. Listen here or watch below👇🏾

“Complaints often get us to the politics of how the institution works. And that’s how I’ve tried to see it - as a lens into the institution.” Writer, scholar and activist Sara Ahmed learned the harsh truth about academic institutions over a decade ago. When a group of students and feminist faculty collectively complained about sexual harassment at their institution - Goldsmiths, University of London - a suite of deflective actions from the university ensured that the complaint never saw light of day and that the harassers stayed protected. In what became a long, drawn out battle against the institution, Ahmed fiercely advocated for all those who complained, and eventually blew the whistle on the university. The atmosphere turned so hostile and abusive towards her that it became untenable to work there and Ahmed resigned.

When the resignation became public and the practices of the university were exposed, Ahmed was flooded with stories from all over the world. People wrote to her sharing that they had gone through something similar: They had been harassed, their complaints had been blocked, and some had even lost their jobs. “And that’s actually what enabled the research,” Ahmed explains.

“It was the kind of connections that are possible when we disclose information that professionalism tells us to keep hidden.” Saying “No” to her institution allowed Ahmed “to be part of a political movement that was not bound by one specific institution, but was actually thinking about what are these structural problems that are not being dealt with.”

Ahmed’s book, NO! The Art and Activism of Complaining, published by Feminist Press (New York, 2026) is an astounding analytical work that exposes the deep rot within institutions of all types. Workplaces in most professions are hotbeds of injustice and oppression, and disproportionately impact women, queer and trans people, people of color, and people with disabilities. NO! emerges from research compiled over several years, as people began telling Ahmed their stories of sexual harassment, racism, sexism, transphobia and ableism in the workplace. Ahmed became a friend, teacher, parent, activist, therapist and scholar all rolled into one, and cultivated what she called a “feminist ear” in order to listen to and learn from grievances, reports and complaints.

Institutional violence, Ahmed found, was a structure not an event, and is continually replicated by those in power in order to keep themselves in power. The complaint can be one way in which this unchecked power can be disrupted, exposed, and sometimes even ruptured. In NO! Ahmed offers an anatomy of a complaint: what happens when it’s made, how it travels within the system, which complaint is repressed and which is quickly resolved, who complies, who resists, who benefits, and who is cast out.

Ahmed believes that it is nearly impossible for an official complaint to ever become a vehicle for justice, but it is the act of complaining that is ultimately invaluable. The complaint itself, and the solidarities that emerge when a complaint is out there, becomes a tool for power mapping; a means of understanding exactly where power lies, who holds it, and how it moves. Along the way, it exposes the administrators who are invested in preserving the status quo despite pretending to care about helping the person being harassed.

In this wide-ranging conversation with Bhakti Shringarpure, Ahmed discusses the art and activism of complaining by taking apart the nuts and bolts of workplace culture that purports to do one thing, but often does the exact opposite. She interrogates the nature of professionalism, the push for confidentiality, the culture of open secrets, hollow (non) performative gestures, the faux interest in diversity, gender and disability justice, and the institutional gaslighting of the persons who complain about being harassed. In fact, the last years of genocide in Palestine have proven just how low institutions have sunk. Complaints have been manufactured in order to justify the disciplining, harassment and the firing of people who have been outspoken about Palestine.

“So I think that everything you do because you do not believe that it is okay to genocide a people can be used against you,” Ahmed says. “The very language of oppression can be used against you. The very language of being a victim can be used against you. Identity politics can be used against you. Universalism can be used against you. Anything can be used against you.”

Ahmed thinks it’s time to get louder and more creative. This might mean turning your complaint into a placard or a prayer or a poster, or even a post-it, where it can be seen. Complaints may not become instruments of justice, but they can be deployed to raise consciousness.

“We’re in a time of grotesque imperial wars,” Ahmed says. “We have to keep complaining and keep protesting.”

Buy NO! The Art and Activism of Complaining here: https://feministpress.org/products/9781558613683-no

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

On April 8th, 2026, Israel’s savage attacks on Lebanon left over 300 dead and thousands injured in a day of massacres reminiscent of 1982. They targeted the capital, Beirut, and many areas of Southern Lebanon with several dozen fighter jets and hundreds of rounds of ammunitions. No warnings were given. In fact, even before this bloodbath, Israel’s unhinged strikes on Lebanon have left over 1500 dead and over a million people have been displaced in the last three weeks. Nearby, Israel’s genocide continues unabated in Palestine and only a little farther away, the death toll in Iran keeps rising from US-Israeli bombardment.

While most braced for the worst after Trump gave an ultimatum to Iran and threatened to destroy an entire civilization, a news channel in Israel aired a countdown clock, and excitedly waited for Trump to obliterate Iran. Soon, a ceasefire appeared on the horizon. Israel could barely believe it. Lest they stop killing for a brief minute, they pounded Lebanon with a vile and hungry intensity. They went on to beat their own record at murder: 100 airstrikes in 10 minutes.

The Israeli military has called this Operation Eternal Darkness. Ironically, it describes the Israelis themselves because they are the ones plunged in an eternal darkness — they have no empathy and define themselves by the desire to annihilate an entire race of people. They have no knowledge of themselves and of the world they inhabit; certainly neither do they have the intellect nor wisdom to pull themselves out of this darkness.

The US, Europe and plenty of other nations enable Israel to thrive in this darkness. The spoilt child is coddled, and their narratives of trauma and victimization are strategically held up so that it can become a justification for the rest of the world to keep on plundering, killing, colonizing with impunity. But the jig is up and the game has gone stale. Even the bloodthirsty US is seeking to cease the fire but Israel will not even entertain the notion of it. If they stop killing, who will they be?

Due to collective moral collapse and an evacuation of humanity, Israel has no functioning institutions that can pave the way with notions of rights and justice. They have voted to legalize the death penalty for Palestinians; a majority of whom are held without charges, and many of whom are mere children. Israel’s economy is entirely dependent on the US, there is rampant censorship, and there is no robust anti-war movement. All of this exposes a dark national psyche.

Israel’s existential darkness makes it impossible for them to see the light. But their eternal darkness means perpetual war and suffering for everyone else.

Love and solidarity❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

Recent publications on the Radical Books Collective

1) A conversation with scholar and editor Nikhil Pandhi about his book Love in a Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist Anthology of Love Stories. Listen here or watch below👇🏾

2) On the problems inherent in the ‘No Kings’ protests.

3) A conversation with writer Tareq Baconi about his queer, Palestinian memoir Fire in Every Direction. Listen here or watch below👇🏾

4) And Michael Jackson mania officially begins.

The Lioness Archive’s Substack

The Michael Jackson Biopic Is Here.

Time magazine has published a special edition on Michael Jackson, released to coincide with the biopic Michael. It costs $14.99…

Read more

a month ago · 3 likes · Sherry Zane

A story about love can “unspool the complexities of caste,” says Nikhil Pandhi, the editor of Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist Anthology of Love Stories published by Zubaan Books, an indie feminist press based in India. Such stories not only serve to give space to the rich, inner lives of Dalit communities but they can be an important resource for anyone who is keen to understand caste. “Rather than quoting an academic treatise, I felt like it is just much easier for them to read a short story,” says Pandhi.

A collection of 17 stories from across India, Love in the Time of Caste makes love the prism through which one can observe, absorb, and critique caste regimes in India. The book powerfully illustrates the ways in which the violence of casteism permeates all aspects of social relations while simultaneously structuring Dalit lives, psyches and sociality too.

Unsurprisingly, these are not sappy love stories with happy endings. Rather, “this is love that is anchored in embodied violence that is so real” that even dreaming, fantasizing and desiring can become perilous. Caste is necropolitical, says Pandhi, but the writers in the book rearrange those desires and reframe circuits of connection and belonging. The stories span a wide range of themes, certainly love but also revenge, inter-caste and intra-caste relationships, heartbreak, healing, toxic masculinity, Dalit women’s agency, the absence of childhood, and, quite often, quests for freedom.

Pandhi states that the stories attempt to explore different ways of inhabiting love. Even the conversation on love “is so saturated by heterosexism and a hetero-patriarchal Brahmanical understanding that it’s hard to even get at it.” To unravel this knot requires a subversion of these norms from within. One goal of the collection was to “rethink Dalits as passionate subjects and Dalit life as capable, in a very critical fashion, of generating new ways of affiliation.”

Anchoring these reflections on love is a deeply considered anti-caste, Dalit feminism that is stitched into the fabric of every single story in the book. Pandhi defines anti-caste, Dalit feminism as “a rejection of Brahmanical norms, Brahmanical sensitivities and sensibilities around touch, around intimacy, around how desire should be performed, around this obsession with respectability politics, around expressions and economies of flesh.” Yet it is not defined by negation but by its capaciousness and creativity.

Pandhi says that he has twenty pen drives of unpublished love stories and he believes this is intrinsically connected to “Dalit feminism as a creative and critical project that is expanding outwards, that is global in its scope, that is looking at global feminisms, but is very conscious of the fact that it also represents something that has a frictious relationship with what is normative feminism in the Indian context.”

In the foreword to the anthology, writer Anita Bharti asks what keeps Dalit life intact despite the excess of violence, harm, injury and humiliation being meted out on a daily basis? Pandhi believes that Bharti’s prescient question is “urging us to think about the fact that hope or that compassion, that maitri, emerges because there is a very intimate understanding of what pain is, what pain does. And one of the things that vedana or pain does is it also potentializes chetana. It also potentializes consciousness. Consciousness is only known to someone who actually knows.”

Buy the book:
Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist anthology of love stories edited and translated by Nikhil Pandhi — https://zubaanbooks.com/shop/love-in-the-time-of-caste-a-dalit-feminist-anthology-of-love-stories/

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

Subscribe | Follow www.radicalbookscollective.com

Subscribe now

Bhakti Shringarpure and Madhuri Sastry unpack the ways in which the “No Kings” protests were anchored in mainstream, white and liberal feminist ideas. They ask why there was no popular interest in protesting genocide in Palestine and analyze the rampant American patriotism on display, the obsession with aesthetics as posters about royalty, crowns and the statue of liberty proliferated. The No Kings protests were mired in a nostalgia for a pre-Trump America thus operating under the delusion that previous American president were not invested in wars, imperials foreign policies and border regimes. The protests lacked any solid agendas to bringing about change and dismantling existing structures of violence.

Listen to previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.radicalbookscollective.com/s/its-not-you-its-the-media

Watch previous episodes of It’s Not You, It’s The Media here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLstXMEF0r05bhdfv7yCt5V2KXTdK4cO5F

Previous episodes of our podcast It’s Not You, It’s The Media are right here: https://www.radicalbookscollective.com/s/its-not-you-its-the-media

Share

Subscribe now

Sound familiar?

The US and Israeli war on Iran has encircled the entire world into a state of crisis. Fear, paranoia, hyper-anticipation and shock at violence is now being experienced collectively, by everyone, everywhere. Finally.

The brutality of the genocide in Gaza and the sheer enormity of numbers of people dying or being displaced for two and a half years never registered for vast swathes of people worldwide. Not because people don’t have news or internet but due to the enormous power wielded by mainstream media in imperial and sub-imperial countries. The vile anti-Muslim narrative and the animus against Palestinians specifically has peaked in the last couple of years, and has gone hand in hand with extremist, racist and pro-Zionist politicians consolidating power. The same mainstream media has also ignored the war in Sudan coming up to four years next month.

Without a doubt, there have been big shifts when it comes to popular opinion on Palestine and the Muslim world, broadly, and we should be heartened by the massive effort to dismantle misrepresentation and produce counter-narratives in social media, publications, films and documentaries. That said, I remain impatient and discontent (rightfully so) with the math of gains versus losses, and optimism versus pessimism.

The disinterest and the deliberate lack of engagement with Palestine has now been spelled out in big letters with the Trump obsession and the war on Iran. Suddenly, everyone has been activated. Atrocious numbers of children dead, accounts of torture, and unseeable images of suffering in Palestine did not move the needle for the media and the general public. But now, suddenly, outrage about Trump and sudden desire to protect immigrants against ICE has erupted. The war in Iran has plunged everyone into a state of great despair and stupidly, a state of surprise. Suddenly, everyone is asking why Trump is bending to Israel and Netanyahu, or why should US interfere in a country so far away. This is an unbearable and performative innocence. As if the process of Americans spending billions and billions of dollars either to wipe people out or to choke them to death is new. Think Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, Yemen, Venezuela, Iran, the list can go on.

Suddenly, its not only media, politicians and entire nations calling for an end to the war on Iran, but even friends, relatives and acquaintances that have not given two hoots about Palestine are all twitterpated. For the last two years, social interactions have been difficult whether in real life or online, and these same people have created and nurtured a depressive state of cognitive dissonance for me and other like-minded folks. Now, suddenly, these same people have become political! They are posting online about ICE and Trump and Iran. Suddenly, everyone’s making all the connections between oil, weapons, economy, politics, what have you. They are attending idiotic No Kings marches. (Yes, they are idiotic because Trump is not a king but a democratically elected leader and protests should focus on the system and not Trump.) These same people not stand in solidarity with Palestine encampments where students were being brutalized.

Today, I feel disgust and disdain about all this. Tomorrow, someone wise will ask me to look at this moment as an opportunity to build solidarities, resistance, and coalitions, and explain to me that we should focus on how to instrumentalize this political energy. Perhaps this is possible but the road looks long, weary and paved with suffering. How many people have to crushed by the machinery of terror that the US and Israel reign over? Recent research by Lancet Global Health claims that the US and European sanctions have killed 38 million people since 1970. What kind of astounding number is this?

How many more people have to die before the world decides its time to be on the right side of history? When will people stop indulging their dangerous selective empathy? How much longer will people live atomic, individual lives in echo chambers pretending that what is happening in Palestine is somehow not connected to Iran and ICE and the rise of fascism? Last week, Israeli soldiers tortured an 18-month old Palestinian baby with nails and lit cigarettes to coax something out of his father. Big media outlets didn’t carry this story and all those people in my life who are angry about Trump and Iran did not bring this up. This is the perfect illustration of “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” as Yeats called it. How many children have to be sacrificed before the world rises up?

Love and solidarity❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

Recent publications on the Radical Books Collective

1) A conversation with writer Tareq Baconi about his memoir Fire in Every Direction that explores his interconnected queer and Palestinian identity👇🏾

2) A guest essay on Michael Jackson and how his positions were erased, especially around the Middle East. A provocative and enjoyable read👇🏾

3) A recent episode of the media gaslighting podcast about Iran and the proliferation of AI and Lego videos, fake news, memes and fake movie trailers👇🏾

Bhakti Shringarpure and Madhuri Sastry discuss the acute escalation in US-Israeli wars in Lebanon and Iran. The mainstream media barely reports on the shocking death toll and numbers of displaced in Lebanon. Not only is Israel's ground invasion of Lebanon expanding, the Gaza playbook seems to be in full effect with the targeting of civilian infrastructure, hospitals, women and children.

In Iran, the war comes at immense material cost for Iranians as the death toll rises. The hosts unpack the ways in which Iran is winning the cultural war through a proliferation of AI & Lego videos that humiliate, shame and heckle US and Israel on the cyber battlefront. These videos are changing the narrative and shifting public opinion by stoking the existing unpopularity of US and Israel on the world stage. However, the abundance of videos, deepfakes, memes and satirical movie trailers creates a fog around what is real and what is not.

The question remains: with legacy media being ideologically compromised and the social media flooded with fake videos, where do we turn to for news and information?

Subscribe now

“I had always placed my queer identity and my Palestinian identity in different buckets,” admits writer Tareq Baconi. This changed when he began writing his memoir, Fire in Every Direction, a first-person account of young Tareq, a Palestinian boy living in Jordan and gradually coming to terms with his sexuality.

“Through the writing of this book, and as I became more involved in Palestine organizing, I realized that this separation is obviously a false separation,” Baconi says. “Not only that, I began to understand that I came to Palestine through a queer lens, and specifically through my experience of identifying as queer in Jordan, sort of breaking apart or resisting these hegemonic structures that are placed on us.”

Fire in Every Direction is Baconi’s second book, and it is a surprising pivot. His first book, Hamas Contained:The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, was a scholarly work rather than a personal and intimate reflection. The memoir positions coming out as gay and coming out as Palestinian as deeply connected journeys. Along the way, it also reframes and expands the “coming out” trope, the moment when an individual discloses their queer orientation. Queer coming of age stories often position the “coming out” as a triumphant finale, but Baconi’s book instead focuses on the long road ahead for a gay Arab man, showing that the Westernized coming out framing is not one-size-fits-all and requires recalibration, depending on the culture one belongs to.

Fire in Every Direction is a unique and timely book, published at a time when settler colonial violence in Palestine refuses to abate. “It’s heightened in this moment of genocide, when you understand actually that what’s happening in Gaza is because decolonization of the globe or pushing back against empire and colonialism in the West is unfinished business,” he says.

By embracing and embodying the intersections between queer and Palestinian identity, Baconi’s memoir offers a true path to decolonial and liberatory futures.

Further reading:
—Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Baconi: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fire-in-Every-Direction/Tareq-Baconi/9781668068564

—Hamas Contained:The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance by Tareq Baconi
https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/hamas-contained

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

Subscribe | Follow www.radicalbookscollective.com

The song, titled “Palestine, Don’t Cry” and penned on airplane stationery, did not come from nowhere. In the third week of September 1993, Jackson performed two concerts in Tel Aviv, mere days after the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were signed. Accounts of Jackson’s time there are varied, and his views about it blurry. Zane’s essay, a precursor to a book, argues that fog, blurring and rumors were typical of the ways in which Michael Jackson’s political positions were managed and controlled over a wide range of issues, from racism to the environment, violence and, certainly, the Middle East.

The essay shows how solidarities held and expressed by the most visible man in the world were made invisible, time and again. Zane writes: “The establishment resisted the idea of a Black global figure mobilizing grief, recognition, and care on his own terms. These moments do not reveal inconsistency in Jackson’s ethics; they show how quickly solidarity becomes threatening when it reaches millions.”

But Zane also recounts Jackson’s brilliant, strategic ways of tricking those who sought to control him and remaining firm on his beliefs.

There’s no doubt that Michael Jackson’s music reached far and wide, including in the Muslim world. In 2004, my friend and I were traveling by car through remote areas of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. We made a pit stop by a crumbling roadside stall, and a little boy, no older than nine, serenaded us with a Michael Jackson tune and insisted we buy a Michael Jackson CD from the handful he was selling. This is before the time of social media and widespread wifi connections; the music had traveled here by the sheer force of Jackson’s influence. In India, where I grew up, Jackson’s music was beloved, his choreography was mimicked in Bollywood movies and by street impersonators, and his music videos were received as peak innovation in a film-mad country. Of course, a kid in rural Morocco would know of Michael Jackson. We got in the car and drove off, amused but unaffected.

But thinking back to this moment now, I realize how little we actually know about Jackson’s relationship to the Muslim world. Zane’s eye-opening essay takes “Palestine, Don’t Cry” as a point of entry is a great start. Certainly, in Palestine, he lives on👇🏾

Love and solidarity ❤️‍🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure

Recent publications and podcasts

—“Here are four ways Zohran Mamdani can end financial support in New York City for Israeli settlements, and he must act soon” by Nerdeen Kiswani: https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/here-are-four-ways-zohran-mamdani-can-end-financial-support-in-new-york-city-for-israeli-settlements-and-he-must-act-soon/

—Susan Abulhawa’s powerful response to Mayor Mamdani

Watch the podcast on YouTube