All tagged History
Anarchist writer, musician, and podcaster Margaret Killjoy returns to the podcast to discuss the political act of writing fiction and imagining the “ambiguous utopia.” I ask Margaret to define what hope is or can be, and how her work communicating the stories of radical individuals and movements during pivotal moments throughout history on her podcast, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, can help us (re-)frame contemporary struggles for liberation, justice, and peace in the world today.
Professor and historian Rashid Khalidi joins me to discuss his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. Professor Khalidi weaves his multigenerational familial roots to historic Palestine with decades of academic scholarship to present a narrative that plainly addresses the so-called Israel-Palestine conflict for what it is. He addresses how Palestinian identity was catalyzed and formed over the past century, as well as the responsibility foreign interests have—historically and presently—in perpetuating the ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza.
Indigenous archeologist Dr. Paulette Steeves (Cree-Métis) joins me to discuss The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (University of Nebraska Press), “a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic."
There are myths we are told growing up — be it via schooling, popular media, or elsewhere — that people have lived in the Western Hemisphere for only 10-12,000 years, at most. This is the Clovis First theory. In archeology in particular, this framework, that the peopling of the North and South American continents could only have occurred that recently, is treated as dogma. In comparison to the astounding discoveries made by archeologists on other continents — pushing back human and protohominid migration, settlement, and cultural development hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years into the past — why is it that this story has persisted in this field for so long? This is especially troubling when one considers the hundreds of archaeological sites that show human settlement in the Americas extending back much further into the historical past, as documented by Dr. Paulette Steeves and numerous others.
Author, teacher, and editor Max Haiven joins me to discuss his book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, published through Pluto Books. As Silvia Federici states, this book "powerfully demonstrates how, by following the history of a key commodity, we can reconstruct the logic of imperial capitalism: its destruction of land and bodies, its drive to constantly reduce the means of our reproduction, its relentless production of oppressive regimes."
In this discussion, Haiven details the contours of such subjects as commodity fetishism and human sacrifice, as well as points to the straight line that shoots through the heinous histories of chattel slavery and Western imperialism to the formation of modern global capitalist order, by focusing on one primary and ubiquitous product we all, throughout the course of lives, have consumed countless times and in countless ways: palm oil.
Charlie Angus, MP for the riding of Timmins-James Bay in Ontario, Canada, joins me to discuss his new book Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower, published through House of Anansi Press. He shines a light on how the fascinating, and disturbing, history of a small mining town in Ontario, aptly named Cobalt, is tied up in the genocidal, and ecocidal, history of the nation-state of Canada, and its outsized role in the global mining industry today.
What does a small town in northern Ontario have to with Canada's rise to becoming the world's reigning mining superpower? How is cobalt, this "demonic" metal, tied to some of the most horrific crimes of settler-colonialism and financial, extractive capitalism in the modern era?
