PODCAST

Radical Futures

Bhakti Shringarpure

An invitation to imagine freedom, decolonization and liberatory futures.

society & culture news commentary

All Episodes

49:04

The Ballot as Battleground: Featuring Anjali Enjeti

Radical Futures ·

2026/02/11

Today, in the United States, the right to vote is more precarious and more contested than ever. “I have had front row seats to voter suppression,” writer, poll worker, activist and Georgia resident Anjali Enjeti tells me, referring to Shelby County v. Holder, a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Enjeti explains that things have been going downhill ever since, because “states can now enact voter-suppressing laws and policies that erect

42:18

Is Satire Dead? Featuring Gado

Radical Futures ·

2026/02/04

“Satire is dead. Long live satire,” Tanzanian political cartoonist Gado declares, laughing, as we sit down to discuss the role of satire, humor and cartoons in modern public discourse. Godfrey Mwampembwa - pen name “Gado” - is a prolific and prominent political cartoonist with a career that has spanned three decades.Gado’s talent for drawing, coupled with a voracious interest in the news, led him to cartooning at an early age. Studying architecture at the university in Dar-es-Salam did not quite

45:36

ICE, A Bipartisan Tale of Border Imperialism:...

Radical Futures ·

2026/01/21

“Border regimes are some of the most normalized forms of violence,” writer and activist Harsha Walia says, because even the most progressive people “really struggle with the idea of abolishing the border.”Recently, the murder of Renee Good in the bright light of day, in Minneapolis, has sparked outrage across the US. However, this is a culmination of the past several months of an escalation in the war on migrants and in policing practices. The stories of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk and Kilmar

47:48

Venezuela and the Long View: Featuring Geo Maher

Radical Futures ·

2026/01/07

“This is a brutal sanctions regime.” Writer, political scientist and educator Geo Maher emphatically reminds us about Venezuela. A bipartisan strategy that began with Barack Obama and got much worse under Donald Trump, sanctions have been a deliberate effort to keep Venezuela in a long term chokehold. The seeds to destabilize Venezuela were thus sowed decades ago, even as last week’s US strikes in Caracas left dozens of Venezuelans dead and the unlawful kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolas

39:01

Palestinian Recipes Against Erasure: Featuring Lama...

Radical Futures ·

2025/12/18

Ramallah-based culture writer Lama Obeid finds that the genocide has brought about a paradigm shift - not only in the realms of cookery, cookbooks and recipes, but also in the very food that Palestinians are being made to consume. The attack on food, foodways, health and nutrition is sustained, deliberate and systematic, and works alongside tactics of starvation and hunger. Not only is there widespread scarcity, but the food that is available is processed, unhealthy and acts as slow poison. Lama

58:30

Poetry, Protest and Palestine: Featuring Ammiel Alcalay

Radical Futures ·

2025/12/11

In more than two dozen books spanning Iraq, Bosnia, Palestine and Vietnam, poet, translator and scholar Ammiel Alcalay has crystallized a piercing critique of American imperialism. He illustrates a commitment to places and people upon whom the bloody trail left by American excursions is inscribed, whether abroad or at home. Alcalay has crafted a unique insider-outsider approach grounded in poetic practice, a study of languages, and which embraces a wide range of materials: news, poems, letters,

44:37

Documenting Sudanese Food as an Act of Resistance:...

Radical Futures ·

2025/11/19

“Food is politics,” Omer Al Tijani declares. “The documenting of cuisine and culture is an act of resistance against the ongoing oppression that we have been experiencing in Sudan.” In a country ravaged by war and where hunger has been weaponized in extreme ways, Omer’s extraordinary cookbook Sudanese Kitchen works against invisibility and erasure.Sudanese Kitchen is a culmination of decade-long efforts to document Sudanese food and foodways, and to combine the genres of ethnography, archive, memoir

41:14

Undoing Empire, One Story at a Time: Featuring Sunny...

Radical Futures ·

2025/10/30

Writer, scholar, and educator Sunny Singh explains that everything she does “centers around finding ways to undo empire.” The world we have inherited is “an ongoing colonial project” and thus “the wars, the genocides that we're watching now, are still the same colonial wars.”Imperial powers have poured vast resources into usurping power through shaping narratives. “Before a single shot is fired, before a single grain of rice is confiscated as it happened in the Bengal famine; before a single package

49:01

The Marginalization and Policing of Muslims in Kenya:...

Radical Futures ·

2025/10/24

Kenya’s Muslim population has “long experienced political and economic marginalization” says Samar Al-Bulushi, anthropologist and author of War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, United States and the War on Terror. Samar traces a rather under-explored contemporary history; that of Kenya’s role in the US-led War on Terror. The book investigates the ways in which Kenya emerges as a significant geopolitical player during the first two decades of the 21st century. With the US outsourcing its wars, Kenya was

54:20

Palestine and the Racist Fiction of a Two-State...

Radical Futures ·

2025/10/18

“I spent the first two months of the genocide in Gaza,” writer, professor and activist Haidar Eid explains. “In Gaza itself, I was displaced three times.” After being evacuated in December 2023, Eid went from Gaza to South Africa, which became his “fourth displacement.” He is now based on Johannesburg and has been closely scrutinizing the 20-point Gaza ceasefire plan strong-armed by Trump and Netanyahu.Eid’s scrutiny revolves around whether this plan meets even the bare minimum of fundamental rights

55:57

Palestine, Black & African Solidarities, and the...

Radical Futures ·

2025/10/09

Sisonke Msimang is clear that she is, first and foremost, an African.“Despite the fact that Africa is not a country, I experience myself, I feel myself, to be African,” she tells me. Sisonke was born to South African activist parents and grew up “a child of the freedom struggle.” Even though she moved around a lot, Sisonke feels at home in many countries and continents, as well as within the global Black diaspora.South Africa, however, remains a political and intellectual anchor. By the time she

58:12

Will Everyone Have Always Been Against This?...

Radical Futures ·

2025/09/19

On October 25th, 2023, writer Omar El Akkad wrote a tweet about Palestine: “One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” The narratives about victims and victimizers were already so disproportionate, and the institutional silences so loud given the brutality we were plainly seeing, that El Akkad’s words immediately clicked. The tweet went viral. It also became the

57:23

Black Muslim Refugee Resistance to US Militarism and...

Radical Futures ·

2025/09/11

“I have been writing this book almost my whole life,” Maxamed Abumaye admits when asked about the motivation behind his recently published Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence. Though this is a scholarly book published by a university press, Maxamed deviates from the academic format by making his own life story central to the text. He writes about his family’s journey as they fled the civil war in Somalia and spent many years in a refugee camp

54:55

Discerning Censorship and Rejecting Silence for...

Radical Futures ·

2025/08/27

If you’re being censored or policed, “you learn to recognize the signals your body sends you,” writer Anna Badkhen explains. A few months ago, Anna had turned down an invitation to participate in PEN America’s World Voices festival to protest their “absolutely despicable treatment” of Palestinian writers and journalists. She articulated the reasons for her boycott in a letter which she posted on social media, and in response, Anna received a missive from PEN America that, to her, sounded very much

59:08

On the Rise and Fall of Statues: Featuring Rahul Rao

Radical Futures ·

2025/08/13

Whether its legacy figures like Cecil Rhodes, Mahatma Gandhi and B.R Ambedkar, or various military men or aggressive phallic sculptures, statues are the public’s direct and unavoidable encounter with institutionally constructed histories. They represent the supremacy of colonialism, race, caste and gender, and so movements centered on either dismantling or building them have become critical for understanding charged debates around history and memory today. Rahul Rao’s book The Psychic Lives of

01:02:04

Frantz Fanon Stands for Revolutionary Love, Not...

Radical Futures ·

2025/07/26

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist, prolific scholar, and active participant in the Algerian war of independence against France would have been 100 years old this year. He wrote about a wide range of topics yet it is his reflections on colonial violence and the counter-violence of the colonized that loom large even today, 64 years later.Despite filmmaker Hassane Mezine’s and my own fairly immersive knowledge about Fanon’s life and work, our conversation inevitably turns to Fanon’s theory

49:22

Frantz Fanon at 100: Featuring Olivier Fanon [In French]

Radical Futures ·

2025/07/16

Podcast was recorded in French. English subtitles are available in the YouTube video included below. Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, scholar and revolutionary, would have turned 100 years old this year had his life not been cut short by leukemia at the age of 36. By then, Olivier Fanon, the son of Frantz and Josie Fanon, had already spent his childhood in Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana and other places where his parents were active participants in the anti-colonial struggle for Algerian independence. He was

01:03:05

The Repression of Palestine on Campuses: Featuring...

Radical Futures ·

2025/07/13

Anthropologist Maura Finkelstein had always incorporated Palestine in her university teaching and felt that, as an anti-Zionist, Jewish American academic, it was her moral obligation to do so. She knew well the type of repression and harassment that Palestinian academics experienced at US universities, but thought that being a Jewish scholar would likely protect her. Absurdly, Maura became the first tenured American academic to be fired for allegedly making Jewish students at the Muhlenberg College

01:04:38

What Does It Feel Like To Be A Problem? Featuring...

Radical Futures ·

2025/07/06

For the last two years, Huda Fakhreddine has endured a barrage of harassment by the US government and her employer, the University of Pennsylvania, for the simple reason that she writes about, teaches and translates Palestinian poetry.The witchhunt for academics associated with Palestine is not new, but has ramped up immensely since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza in the autumn of 2023. The stage has been set over the years and the villains have been pre-decided. In December 2023,

42:14

Literary Anthology Shifts the Narrative on Yemen: ...

Radical Futures ·

2025/06/26

The mythology of the city of Sana’a writes itself: nestled in a valley; the charming, crumbling architecture; the winding alleys; and a history and heritage older than time itself. As Yemen’s largest city and its capital, a literary anthology through the lens of Sana’a seems like a natural choice.The Book of Sana'a joins an illustrious list of city fiction anthologies published by Comma Press in the UK. Their series titled "Reading the City" now includes over 30 books. Yet, Yemen today is at a

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