12:00 PM Pacific Time: Mondays - Wednesdays
Acclaimed program of ideas, 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 produced and hosted by Sasha Lilley.
How best to understand the violence and discrimination directed against queer and trans people of color? Eric A. Stanley considers these phenomena through multiple lens. He brings up chattel slavery, commodification, biocapital, pharmaceutical industry practices, LGBT activism, and what he calls cellular labor to elucidate the nature and consequences of racialized anti-trans/queer violence. Eric Stanley, … Continued
Open any world history book and you’ll read that the Neolithic Revolution was a turning point for humanity, when hunter gatherers gave up roving in small egalitarian groups and settled down to farm. Out of that, civilization was born, with all the benefits and ills connected to it: the rise of cities, the emergence of … Continued
Egalitarianism is a thing of our distant past, or so we learn from conventional history. After a long stretch as hunter-gatherers roaming in small bands, our societies became bigger and more complex. And as they became larger, and cities emerged, hierarchy was inevitable in the form of kings, priests, and bureaucrats. The late anthropologist and … Continued
Richard Wright, best known for his books “Native Son” and “Black Boy,” was a crucial figure in the Black radical and anticapitalist traditions. So asserts Joseph Ramsey, who has written widely on Wright’s life, literary production, and political commitments. Ramsey also elaborates Wright’s views toward Black nationalism, views that Ramsey contends should be heeded by … Continued
Many are the names forgotten to history, of people who fought to transform our world for the better. One of them was Benjamin Lay, a trailblazing figure who opposed slavery and devoted his life to forcing his fellow Quakers to end their complicity in the enslavement of others. Historian Marcus Rediker seeks to rescue a … Continued
What happens when missionaries try to get indigenous people to read and write English? Sometimes what results is very different than what the missionaries intended. Laura Rademaker describes how members of an aboriginal community in Australia resisted and repurposed English literacies. (Encore presentation.) Tony Ballantine, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla, eds., Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing … Continued
The urgency of the climate crisis can’t be overstated. Yet the impediments to a rapid shift to a carbon-free future are numerous. These include not just the obvious problem of the entrenched political power of the fossil fuel industry, but according to Holly Jean Buck, national revenues derived from fossil fuels and the elimination of … Continued
Helena Sheehan participated, as an activist, educator, and Marxist philosopher, in a great variety of radical movements and groupings, among them the New Left, the IRA, and the Communist Party of Ireland. She describes her engagements with many of the key ideas and debates around socialism and communism, both in the U.S. and abroad. (Encore … Continued
Few things sound as American as choice. And in the United States, the freedom to send one’s child outside of the traditional public school system is a choice that has been promoted aggressively since the legal end to segregation in schools. Scholar Jon Hale traces how the notion of school choice was used to fight … 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. (Encore presentation.) Michael Robertson, The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy Princeton University Press, … Continued
