Against The Grain – November 20, 2019
Upcoming Episode
Against the Grain
12:00 PM Pacific Time: Mondays to Wednesdays
In-depth analysis and commentary on a variety of matters — political, economic, social, and cultural — important to progressive and radical thinking and activism. Against the Grain is co-produced and co-hosted by Sasha Lilley and C.S. Soong.
Resources: Penelope Rosemont, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields City Lights Books, 2019
In her novel The Book of Disappearance, the Palestinian writer and journalist Ibtisam Azem explores themes of memory, loss, and ideology in the context of the 1948 Nakba and of an imagined sudden disappearance of all Palestinians living in Israel. Also: more with Michael Robertson about his book The Last Utopians. Ibtisam Azem, The Book … Continued
A remarkable revolution has been taking place in Northern Syria, based on women’s liberation, ecological sustainability, and democratic confederalism. Yet it’s in danger of being wiped out by the Turkish state, which has long wanted to annihilate the Kurdish population of the region. Scholars Laura Fantone and Andrej Grubacic discuss what’s at stake in Rojava … Continued
First grade, second grade — schooling as we know it divides children and classes into grades according to age and ability. This hasn’t always been the case, says Eli Meyerhoff. He links the advent of grade-divided schools in fourteenth-century Europe to a mindset and imaginary that fueled the emergence and development of capitalism. Eli Meyerhoff, … Continued
Americans are watching more media than ever before, but trusting it less. Why and how is that possible? Journalist Matt Taibbi reflects on those questions in a piercing analysis of the mainstream media system, drawing on the work of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, as well as many decades of experience in the trenches of … Continued
William Morris’s designs are still admired and revered, but his radical politics and utopian inclinations are less well known. Michael Robertson discusses the nineteenth-century Englishman’s insistence on craftsmanship, his critiques of industrialism, his turn toward socialism, and his utopian novel News From Nowhere. Michael Robertson, The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy … Continued
We expect to find strawberries in the supermarket all year round. But geographer Julie Guthman argues that for strawberries to be produced throughout the year — which used to be harvested a few weeks in spring — has required an enormous marshaling of chemical fumigants, pesticides, workers’ labor, and land. And that effort is now … Continued
Bourdieu and Marx
What can we learn from Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of Marxism? Why did the influential French sociologist reject Marx’s emphasis on labor and class struggle? Michael Burawoy lays out Bourdieu’s famous troika of interrelated concepts: habitus, field, and capital. He also points out some of the key differences between how Bourdieu and Marx thought about politics, … Continued
If we look back over the 20th century and even into the 19th, we can see a series of historical periods that shaped how food was produced and consumed. And we can see how periods of relative stability alternated with periods of crisis. Sociologist Harriet Friedmann discusses her theory of food regimes and what they … Continued
According to Margaret Hunter, growing numbers of white people are “shape shifting into Blackness”: they’re taking on or inhabiting aspects or characteristics of Blackness. Hunter discusses the emergence of three forms of Blackness tried on by whites in the post-civil rights era: cultural Blackness, political Blackness, and intellectual Blackness. Tamai, Dineen-Wimberly, and Spickard, eds., Shape … Continued