This event is part of the Publishers for Palestine coalition's Exist, Resist, Return: A Week of Action for Nakba Day (May 14-21).

Readings by Aidah Masoud, Ibtisam Azem, Najla Said, Huda Fakhredinne, Maaza Mengiste, Valérie Gruhn, Mona Eltahawy, Sean Jacobs, Emna Zghal, Suha Araj, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Christina Dhanuja, Zohra Saed, Christopher Stone, Suneela Mubayi, Hafsa Kanjwal, Omar Berrada, Anna Arabindan Kesson, Jee Leong Koh, Anthony Alessandrini and Siddhartha Deb.

“Freedom Dance,”composed & performed by Kesivan Naidoo [The revolution was never televised. When Mandela led the struggle against apartheid, he knew that the battle would be won not in the media but in the minds and hearts of the people coming together through a revolution in four-part rhythm.]

Organized by Radical Books Collective and The Polis Project at The People's Forum, New York.

Stella Gaitano was born in Khartoum in 1979 into a South Sudanese family. She studied English and Arabic at Khartoum University and trained as a pharmacist. When the Sudan was partitioned, she moved to Juba, the capital of South Sudan in 2012. In 2015 Gaitano had to move back to Khartoum, after having been harassed and attacked due to her criticism of the South Sudanese government for what she saw as its mismanagement, corruption, and its role in the South Sudanese civil war. In 2022 Gaitano was awarded a fellowship by the PEN International Writers-in-Exile programme and moved to Germany She has chosen to write in Arabic and has published 2 short story collections and the novel Edo’s Souls in 2018. Edo's Souls is the first book from South Sudan to be translated into English.

Reem Gaafar is a Sudanese public health physician, researcher, writer and mother of three boys. She is published in both fiction and non-fiction circles, contributing to issues on public health and policy, society, racism and women’s rights. Her work has appeared in African Arguments, 500 Words Magazine, Teakisi Magazine, African Feminism, Andariya Magazine, International Health Policies and Health Systems Global. Her short story Light of the Desert was published in the anthology I Know Two Sudans (Gipping Press, UK). Her second short short Finding Descartes was published in the anthology Relations: African and Diaspora Voices (HarperVia). Her debut novel A Mouth Full of Salt is published by Saqi Books in the UK and US, and Invisible Publishing in Canada.

Mayada Ibrahim is Managing Editor at Tilted Axis. She is based in Queens, New York, and has roots in Khartoum and London. As a literary translator, she works between Arabic and English. Her translations have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published by University of Nebraska Press, Willows House, Archipelago Books, Dolce Stil Criollo, and 128 Lit. She is the co-translator of Samahani, a novel by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin which was the Winner of the 2024 PEN Translates Award.

The YouTube playlist includes:

1. Unlearning War in the Classroom
   Sherry Zane, Bhakti Shringarpure

2. Gaslighting as Method and Ways to Resist it
   Suchitra Vijayan, Suzy Salamy, Bhakti Shringarpure

3. Wounds of War: On Health and Healing
   Valerie Gruhn, Danielle Villasana, Zahra Moloo

4. Poetry of Witness
   Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Jehan Bseiso, Meg Arenberg

5. In Love and War: Collective Memory and the Self
   Samina Najmi, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Beverly Parayno.

About the book
Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press, 2024) advances a new paradigm of war writing by focusing on gender. These feminist and queer perspectives on war come out of regions and positions that disobey the rules of war writing. The book includes reportage, fiction, memoir, poetry, and conversations from 60 writers and covers over 20 regions, primarily from the Global South.

Buy Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War

Panelists include Mansoor Adayfi, Safiyah Rochelle, Suchitra Vijayan, Alexandra Moore, and Elizabeth Swanson. Deaf Walls Speak offers a unique and groundbreaking perspective on artmaking in Guantánamo, the world’s most notorious prison, through a focus on detainee artist Moath al-Alwi’s testimony and artwork. Moath's incredible art is juxtaposed with essays that situate his work within legal, political, aesthetic, and material contexts to demonstrate that artwork at Guantánamo constitutes important forms of material witnessing to human rights abuses perpetrated and denied by the U.S. government.

Mansoor Adayfi, originally from Yemen, is a writer and former detainee in the Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp who was held for over fourteen years without charge before being transferred to Serbia. His essays have appeared in the New York Times’ Modern Love column and Op-Ed pages and the edited collection, Witnessing Torture: Perspectives of Torture Survivors and Human Rights Workers (Palgrave 2018), and the Ode to the Sea art exhibition catalogue. In 2019 he was awarded the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writing that illuminates issues of social justice. His memoir of his time at Guantánamo, Don’t Forget Us Here, was published in 2021 by Hachette Books.

Safiyah Rochelle is a researcher whose areas of interest and teaching centers on exploring the relationship between state violence, visual politics, law, and marginalized populations. She is currently working on two projects: the first examines racial governance and redress in the aftermath of state violence, and the second explores the spatial, visual, and imaginative boundaries of mourning and memorialization for victims of mass state violence.

Elizabeth Swanson holds the Joyce and Andy Mandell Endowed Professorship of Literature and Human Rights at Babson College. She is the author of Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights (Rutgers UP, 2007), Dr. Swanson has co-edited six volumes and written many articles that explore human rights and literature, with a special focus on bringing the voices of survivors and human rights workers to the public. Dr. Swanson is also founding partner of Jane’s Way, a Diversity, Equity, and Belonging Consultancy that delivers academic knowledge about race, gender, and difference to organizations seeking to improve their cultures of belonging.

Alexandra Moore is Professor of English and Director of the Human Rights Institute at Binghamton University. She writes frequently on Guantanamo and made her first visit to the naval base and military commissions facilities this past fall. Her publications include Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture (2015) and Regenerative Fictions: Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis, and the Nation as Family (2004). She has also co-edited several volumes on the intersection of human rights and literature.

Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer and activist. She is the founder and Executive Director of The Polis Project. For her first book, Midnight's Border: A People's History of India, Suchitra traveled across the 9000-mile Indian border. A barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees. She is the co-author of How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (2023) which offers a lens into today's India through the lived experiences of political prisoners.

We gathered online from many parts of the world to commemorate his rich, urgent and inspiring contributions to Palestinian resistance.

More on the readings of "If I Must Die"

Meg Arenberg (in the original English)
Ida Hadjivayanis (in Swahili, her own translation)
Orhan Elmaz (in Albanian, translation by Genta Nishku)
Farah Bakaari (in Somali, translation by Aziz Mahdi)
Suchitra Vijayan (in Tamil, translation by Ponni and Mangai)
Surafel Wondimu (in Amharic, his own translation)
Zohra Saed (in Farsi, translation by Ahmad Rashid Salim)
Greg Pierrot (in French, his own translation)
David Acosta (in Spanish, his own translation)
Bhakti Shringarpure (in Hindi, translation by Aparna Gopalan)
Farah Bakaari (in Arabic, translation by Tamim)

About Dr. Refaat Alareer
Refaat Alareer (23 September 1979 – 6 December 2023) was a Palestinian writer, poet, educator, scholar and activist. He was born in Gaza City in 1979 and earned a BA in English in 2001 from the Islamic University of Gaza, an MA from University College London in 2007 and a PhD in English Literature at the Universiti Putra Malaysia in 2017. Dr. Alareer taught literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and co-founded the organization We Are Not Numbers, which matched experienced authors with young writers in Gaza, and promoted the power of storytelling as a means of Palestinian resistance. His published works include Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014) and Gaza Unsilenced (co-edited with Laila El-Haddad, 2015) as well as numerous essays and poems. Dr. Alareer was a beloved teacher and his work is kept alive by his many students worldwide.

Watch the recording!

The seminar will start with a short session convened by Anne Harley and Firoze Manji who will speak about Paulo Freire in Africa. It will followed by a longer session from Dr. Darder who will offer an introduction to the general arc of Freire's life and work as well as a chapter by chapter analysis of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We will then have one hour for comments and questions from the seminar participants.

You can buy the book in stores as well online as it is available widely. We will also provide PDFs to those who are unable to procure a copy.

About Dr. Antonia Darder
Antonia Darder is an internationally recognized scholar, artist, poet, songwriter, activist, and public intellectual, and is the recipient of the Paulo Freire Social Justice Award. She has worked tirelessly for more than three decades to fiercely counter social and material inequalities at work in schools and communities. Her scholarship focuses on issues of racism, political economy, education, social justice, and society. More recently, she has worked to articulate a critical theory of leadership for social justice and community engagement. For more than a decade, she held the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Leadership in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA. She is a Professor Emerita of Education at LMU and a Professor Emerita of Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Formerly, she also held a Distinguished Visiting faculty post at the University of Johannesburg, in South Africa.

In the late 80s and early 90s, Darder studied and worked with renowned Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, whose ideas profoundly influenced the direction of her life's work. Her book Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love focused on Freire's important contributions to education, particularly from the standpoint of oppressed communities. More recently, her book Freire & Education was released in both English and Portuguese. In 2016 she was also awarded the Paulo Freire Democratic Project award, given to individuals who embody the life and legacy of Paulo Freire and who are characterized by intellectual excellence, ethical concern and deep commitment to the creation, nurturing, and sustainability of fair and just communities. In 2018 (the 50^th anniversary of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed), she published The Student Guide to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Darder is the author of Culture and Power in the Classroom (the 20^th anniversary edition of which was released in 2012) and Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, named outstanding book in curriculum for 2001-2002 by the American Educational Research Association. She is also co-author of After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism. She is the editor of Culture and Difference and co-editor of Latinos and Education; The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy and Society, and The Critical Pedagogy Reader. A Dissident Voice: Essay on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power, a twenty-year retrospective of her writings, was released in 2012. The book is a compilation of 21 essays and seven poems published from 1991 to 2011.

Over the years, Darder has collaborated on numerous social justice projects with students. In 2009, Darder's documentary, Breaking Silence: The Pervasiveness of Oppression, was awarded the second-place prize at the Central Illinois Women's Film Festival. The film was produced with a team of graduate students and community members involved in the Diversity and Technology for Engaging Communities research team, a study examining issues of power, privilege, and racism on the UIUC campus. In 2005, working with graduate students and community members, she established the Liberacion! Radio Collective, that examines politics, art, and struggle through the nexus of local/global connections.

Apart from the awards already mentioned above, Prof. Darder has received numerous other awards, including the Scholars of Color Lifetime Distinguished Career Contribution Award by the American Education Research Association; the Eminent Scholar Award from Southern Queensland University, Toowoomba, Australia; a Thinker in Residence Distinguished Faculty Fellowship from Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia; and a Rains Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Work. She has also been the recipient of a Distinguished International Research Fellow Award from New Castle University, Callaghan, Australia; and a Heroes Award from the Sisters of Saint Joseph for Reconciliation and Justice awarded to individuals who exemplify justice and reconciliation in their lives. Along with a national Kellogg Foundation Fellowship, she has also received the Social Justice in Education Award from the University of New Mexico, and recognition for her Outstanding Service to the Latino Community from El Centro de Acción Social. Darder was one of 72 women chosen to appear in Victoria Alvarado's book, Mujeres de Consciencia/Women of Conscience, a tribute to U.S. Latinas who have made a definite and long-standing contribution to the Latino community and the nation at large. Darder is a visual artist and poet. Writing and performing in English and Spanish, her poetry and songs speak of love, struggle, and freedom.

About the co-conveners
Anne Harley is a senior lecturer in adult education at the University of KwaZulu Natal (Pietermaritzburg) in South Africa. Prior to joining the university as a researcher in 1994, she did research work for an anti-apartheid women’s organization and a land rights NGO. Working within the radical adult education tradition, she is particularly interested in informal adult education/learning in/through/with struggle, and her work focuses on counter-hegemonic learning and theorizing, particularly in subaltern social movements, and is thus related to issues of emancipatory politics, the notion of civil society, and discourses of ‘development’ in South Africa and beyond. She has published numerous academic articles and chapters, and produced a number of popular publications. As part of her work, she heads up the Paulo Freire project, an affiliate of the Paulo Freire Institute in Brazil, which runs projects to further the thinking and work of the Brazilian educationist. She is also a member of the Popular Education Network, an international network of people involved in popular education.

Firoze Manji is a writer, publisher and activist with more than 40 years’ experience in international development, health, human rights, teaching, publishing and political organizing. He is the founder and publisher of Daraja Press which describe their mission thus: "We seek to build upon, develop and support interconnections between emancipatory struggles of the oppressed and exploited across the world. In a phrase, our aim is to nurture reflection, shelter hope and inspire audacity." He has published several books and article, and the most recent ones include African Awakenings, The Emerging Revolutions (2011)and China's New Role in Africa and the South: A Search for a New Perspective (2008). He is the recipient of the 2021 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association

About the book
Set in an imagined contemporary African country, The Stone Breakers by Emmanuel Dongala is a gripping novel told from a unique second person point-of-view of the uprising of a group of women stone crushers at a gravel pit, who rise up against their corporate bosses to demand higher wages for their labor—a gruelling process of break rocks down to gravel-size bits to be used as road surfacing for the expansion of the country's airport. Translated by Sara Hanaburgh and published by Schaffner Press.

About the author

Born 1941, Emmanuel Dongala is a Congolese chemist and novelist. The former Dean of the Marien Ngouabi University in Brazzaville, Dongala was forced to flee to the United States from Congo when civil war broke out in 1997, and he was offered a professorship at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where he taught until 2014. He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed, award-winning books, including Johnny Mad Dog and Little Boys Come from the Stars. His work is featured in the Penguin Anthology of Modern African Poetry, and he has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. A film based on Johnny Mad Dog was released in 2008, and this novel also received the Cezam Prix Littéraire Inter CE Award in 2004.

About the translator

Sara Hanaburgh is a scholar (French and Francophone African literature and cinema) and translator working between French, Portuguese, Spanish and English. Her literary translations include Kaveena by Boubacar Boris Diop (Kaveena, 2016), co-translated with Bhakti Shringarpure, and Angèle Rawiri’s novel Fureurs et cris de femmes (The Fury and Cries of Women, 2014). Her articles and translations have appeared in Africa is a Country, The Savannah Review, Warscapes, The Dictionary of African Biography, Imagine Africa, v. 3 and América Latina. She teaches at St. John's University and is currently editing a volume on the history of adaptation of African literature to the screen. She lives in New York.

Moderator Bhakti Shringarpure is the Creative Director for the Radical Books Collective.

About the book
Saroja and Kumaresan are young and in love. After meeting in a small southern Indian town where Kumaresan works at a soda bottling shop, they quickly marry before returning to Kumaresan’s family village, where they hope to build a happy life together. But they are harboring a terrible secret: Saroja is from a different caste than Kumaresan, and if the villagers find out, they will both be in grave danger. Faced with venom from her mother-in-law and questions from her new neighbors, Saroja tries to adjust to a new lonely and uncomfortable life, while Kumaresan struggles to scrape together enough money for them to start over somewhere new. Will their love keep them safe in a world filled with thorns? In evocative prose, Perumal Murugan masterfully conjures a moving tale of innocent young love pitted against chilling violence.

Perumal Murugan is one of India’s most well-known literary writers. He has written eleven novels and five collections each of short stories and poetry. His novels One Part Woman and The Story of a Goat were both longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and One Part Woman also won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman for writing in Indian languages and the Translation Prize from India’s National Academy of Letters.

About the host
Amrita Ghosh is an academic, writer and editor. She is Assistant Professor of South Asian Literatures at University of Central Florida in the department of English. Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books.

Watch the conversation here:

Panelists:

Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin is one of the most prominent novelists and short story writers in Sudan, with more than 15 works of fiction to his name. These include novels such as The Jungo: Stakes of the Earth, The Messiah of Darfur, The Bedouin Lover, The Khandarees, and Samahin. His short story collections include At the Peripheries of Sidewalks, A Woman from Kambo Kadees, and Bones Music. Sakin now lives in Austria and writes for a number of prominent Arab literary publications.

Fatin Abbas is the author of the novel Ghost Season (2023). Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Freeman’s, The Warwick Review, and Friction, and her journalism and review essays have appeared in Le Monde diplomatique, The Nation, Zeit Online, Africa is a Country, Bidoun, African Arguments and openDemocracy. Born in Khartoum, Sudan and raised in New York, she gained her BA in English from the University of Cambridge, her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, the City University of New York. She teaches fiction writing in the department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT.

David L. Lukudu is a South Sudanese writer, who has been writing for a while and has written mainly short fiction, a good number of them with civil war as a backdrop. His writings have been published in Warscapes magazine and BBC Focus on Africa, among others. Some have been featured in short story anthologies, such as There is a Country: New Fiction from the New Nation of South Sudan, edited by Nyuol Lueth (McSweeney, 2013) and Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (Africa World Press, 2016). He is currently working on a collection of short stories. Lukudu is also a public health physician with the World Health Organizagion based in South Sudan.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer and educator who co-founded and edited Warscapes magazine for ten years before it transitioned into the Radical Books Collective. She is the editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (Africa World Press, 2016) and her book Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (Routledge, 2019) looks at the ways in which the Cold War thwarted decolonization movements in colonized regions and used soft power to shape their literary cultures.petuates.

Azad Essa is South African journalist based between Johannesburg and New York covering US foreign policy, Islamophobia and race in the US for Middle East Eye. He is the author of "The Moslems are Coming" (Harper Collins India). His new book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel is forthcoming with Pluto Press.

Natasha Javed works with governments, United Nations agencies and Civil Society Organizations on ending violence against children globally at End Violence Against Children; a global Partnership hosted by UNICEF. Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, she is an activist, film maker and the founder of Lok Katha, a storytelling platform and production house focusing on stories from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Her first documentary capturing stories of the people from Punjab who were uprooted during the 1947 Partition will be released in September 2023.

Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer and activist. She is the founder and Executive Director of The Polis Project. For her book, The Midnight's Border: A People's History of India, Suchitra traveled across the 9000-mile Indian border. A barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer and educator who co-founded and edited Warscapes magazine for ten years before it transitioned into the Radical Books Collective. Her book Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital looks at the ways in which the Cold War thwarted decolonization movements in colonized regions and used soft power to shape their literary cultures.

Published by Titled Axis Press. Winner of the 2022 Booker International Prize and the English PEN Award. Click here to purchase the book .

This event has been organized in collaboration with the University of Central Florida's Department of English and The India Center.

About the book
In northern India, an eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention – including striking up a friendship with a hijra person – confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more 'modern' of the two.

To her family’s consternation, Ma insists on travelling to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.

Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree's playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.

About the author
Geetanjali Shree is the author of four novels as well as story collections, and her work has been translated into English, French, German, Serbian and Korean. Shree was born in Mainpuri, India, in 1957. Tomb of Sand is the first of her books to be published in the UK. She has received and been shortlisted for a number of awards and fellowships, and currently lives in New Delhi.

About the translator
Daisy Rockwell is a painter, writer and translator living in Vermont, US. She has translated a number of classic works of Hindi and Urdu literature, including Upendranath Ashk’s Falling Walls, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her 2019 translation of Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Translation Prize.

About the host
Amrita Ghosh is an academic, writer and editor. She is Assistant Professor of South Asian Literatures at University of Central Florida in the department of English. Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books.

About the participants
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a Palestinian novelist and poet living in Jerusalem.
Sawad Hussain is an Arabic translator, litterateur and Palestine Book Award judge.
Alice S. Yousef is a Palestinian translator, blogger, researcher and poet.
Sonia Nimr is a Palestinian writer, storyteller, translator and academic.
Louis Allday is a writer, historian and founding editor of Liberated Texts.
Jehan Bseiso is a poet, researcher, and aid worker.
Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, activist and founder of The Polis Project.
M. Lynx Qualey is a literary critic, translator editor, and co-founder of ArabLit.
Meg Arenberg is the Managing Editor of the Radical Books Collective.
Bhakti Shringarpure is the Creative Director of the Radical Books Collective.

About the author
Ama Ata Aidoo (b. 1940) was born in Ghana and continues her extraordinary and prolific six-decade career as a writer, educator, and leader. Aidoo started writing at a young age and decided to pursue her calling when she was a student at the University of Ghana (Legon). While at university in the mid-60s, Aidoo wrote two plays, The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa. However, it was her novel Our Sister Killjoy that was to catapult her to fame as well as controversy. She worked as an academic for several years while writing short stories, poetry and plays. She held fellowships and teaching appointments in English, African, and American Studies departments of several universities and colleges in the United States, the United Kingdom and Ghana, and also delivered the Walter Rodney Visions of Africa lectures in London in 1986.

Aidoo became the Minister of Education in 1982 under the Jerry Rawlings administration in Ghana but resigned after 18 months because she felt that she would not be able to make education free for all. She won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for her novel Changes: A Love Story and she founded the Mbaasem Foundation in 2000 which is a nonprofit dedicated to supporting and promoting the work of African women writers. The Aidoo-Snyder book prize, awarded by the Women's Caucus of the African Studies Association for an outstanding book published by a woman that prioritizes African women's experiences, is named in honor of Ama Ata Aidoo and of Margaret C. Snyder, who was the founding director of UNIFEM. Aidoo's vast range of publications include No Sweetness Here (1970), The Eagle and the Chickens (1986; a collection of children’s stories), Birds and Other Poems (1987), An Angry Letter in January and Other Poems (1992), The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1997), and Diplomatic Pounds and Other Stories (2012), among others.

We will start as a chat between our creative director, Bhakti Shringarpure, followed by a conversation with a wonderful panel comprising Ainehi Edoro, Esther Armah, Meg Arenberg and Otoniya J. Okot Bitek. This event is organized in collaboration with Africa is a Country, Brittle Paper, and The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice.

Featuring:
The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers edited by Selma Dabbagh
Glory Hole by Kim Hyun, translated by Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan
..and an interview with Kiru Taye, one of the most prolific romance writers today with an exclusive focus on African love stories.

Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure, Meg Arenberg, M. Lynx Qualey and Rudo Mudiwa.

Trailer

Watch the conversation here:

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer and educator who co-founded and edited Warscapes magazine for ten years before it transitioned into the Radical Books Collective. Her book Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital looks at the ways in which the Cold War thwarted decolonization movements in colonized regions and used soft power to shape their literary cultures.

Nadifa Mohamed is an award-winning Somali-British writer. She has published three novels and they all center historical research to retell stories of war, violence and justice through fiction. Her novel The Orchard of Souls is about three women trapped in Hargeisa as it sinks into war in the eighties. She was nominated for the Booker Prize for her novel, The Fortune Men that is based on the true story of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor who was wrongfully executed in the UK in 1952 for a crime he didn't commit.

Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer and activist. She is the founder and Executive Director of The Polis Project. For her book, The Midnight's Border: A People's History of India, Suchitra traveled across the 9000-mile Indian border. A barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees.

Billy Kahora is a writer and journalist from Kenya and now based in the UK. He was Managing Editor of the Kwani Trust and has edited several issues of Kwani and a sci-fi anthology titled Imagine 500 with Malawiian writers. His stories have been shortlisted for the Caine Prize For African Literature. He is the author of The Cape Cod Bicycle War And Other Stories and was a screenwriter for the films Soul Boy and Nairobi Half Life.

Join us for a celebration of writers, artists, scholars and cooks that use recipes to revolutionize our relationship to cooking, eating, memory and belonging. We will speak to Anas Atassi, Anita Mannur, Ismail Einashe, Zohra Saed, Karim Alrawi, Nahid Kazemi, Durkhanai Ayubi. Conversations will be hosted by Anny Gaul, M. Lynx Qualey, Meg Arenberg, Veruska Cantelli and Bhakti Shringarpure.

Watch the full recording from December 3rd here:

Read this blog to understand the thinking behind this event: https://radicalbookscollective.com/blogs/news/are-cookbooks-radical

We've made a list of Radical Cookbooks with links to buy them!
Sumac Recipes and Stories from Syria by Anas Atassi Buy Here
Arab Fairy Tale Feasts: A Literary Cookbook by Karim Alrawi. Illustrated by Nahid Kazemi. Recipes by Sobhi and Tamam al-Zobaidi & Karim Alwawi Buy HereParwana: Recipes and stories from an Afghan kitchen by Durkhanai Ayubi Buy Here
The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley Buy Here
Soo Fariista / Come Sit Down: A Somali American Cookbook by Wariyaa. Foreword by Osman Mohamed Ali Buy Here
Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-Based Mexican-American Recipes for Health and Healing by Luz Calvo & Catriona Rueda Esquibel Buy Here
Palestine on a Plate: Memories from My Mother's Kitchen by Joudie Kalla Buy Here
Saka Saka: South of the Sahara – Adventures in African Cooking by Anto Cocagne Buy Here
Original Tanzania Cookbook by Eva Pandaeli Buy Here
The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey by Laila el-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt Buy Here
Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader by Anita Mannur Buy Here
Soup for Syria: Recipes to Celebrate Our Shared Humanity by Barbara Abdeni Massaad Buy Here
Handmade: Stories of strength shared through recipes from the women of Sri Lanka by Abarna Suthantiraraj, Shruti Thiruchelvam, Frank Thiruchelvam et al. Buy Here
The Immigrant Cookbook: Recipes that Make America Great by Leyla Moushabeck Buy Here
Dining in Refugee Camps: The Art of Sahrawi Cooking by Robin Kahn. Buy Here
Cooking a Home: A Collection of the Recipes and Stories of Syrian Refugees edited by Pilar Puig Cortada Buy Here
Yolele! Recipes from the Heart of Senegal by Pierre Thiam Buy Here
Malabar Muslim Cookery by Ummi Abdallah Buy Here

Trailer

Join us to celebrate new works of speculative fiction from Africa! In collaboration with Brittle Paper

A journey through sinking red quicksands -- a smart-talking Edinburgh teen who can talk to ghosts -- a porcelain bowl with healing powers -- woman in a coma who can go back and forth in time -- and an all-out post-apocalyptic Africa with robots-gone-human and mer creatures parading the streets.

CHILDREN OF THE QUICKSANDS by Efua Traoré(Chicken House books)
SEASONS IN HIPPOLAND by Wanjiku Ngugi (Seagull Books)
COSMOGRAMMA by Courttia Newland (Akashic Books)
LIBRARY OF THE DEAD by Tendai Huchu (Tor Books)
THEORY OF FLIGHT by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (Catalyst Press)

Moderators: Ainehi Edoro, Bhakti Shringarpure, Meg Arenberg, Lizzy Atree

This seminar has been organized in partnership with the Paul Robeson House and Museum in Philadelphia.

Video of the recording is available upon request. Please write to decolonizethat@gmail.com and let us know why you wish to view the recording.