BookRising Radical Books Collective

Unlearning War in the Classroom is our first conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War. Featuring panelists Sherry Zane, Veruska Cantelli and Bhakti Shringarpure.
Wars, conflict and histories of violence have been continually framed as binary narratives between winners and losers, nation and non-nations, and armies and non-armies. Additionally, in a saturated media landscape, violence and war is often represented as a form of entertainment and this generates a numbness about suffering, pain as well as the psychological and material costs of loss. Prevalent narratives of neutrality, both-sideism and objectivity can legitimize violence towards certain groups of people. Panelists with extensive teaching experience discuss ways in which war can be unlearned in the classroom and disrupt existing ways of producing knowledge about war.
Sherry Zane is a Professor in Residence and the Director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her main research interests include the history of gender, race, sexuality, and U.S. national security. She is the author of, “’I did it for the Uplift of Humanity and the Navy’: Same-Sex Acts and the Origins of the National Security State, 1919-1921” in the New England Quarterly (2018). She is currently researching art activism in Belfast in Northern Ireland and also working on a feminist pedagogical project to make classroom experiences more inclusive.
Veruska Cantelli is Associate Professor in the Core Division at Champlain College. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Global Communication Strategies at the University of Tokyo and also taught Comparative Literature at Queens College, CUNY with a focus on literature of war and women's autobiographies, particularly on non-western narratives of the self. She is the translator of Lettere Rivoluzionarie by Diane di Prima (2021), and the author of "The Dance of Bones: Tomioka Taeko's Stage of Reprobates" in Otherness: Essays and Studies (2021), "The Maternal Lineage: Orality and Language in Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings" for the Journal of International Women's Studies (2017) as well as several articles and interviews for Warscapes magazine. She is the co-editor of Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (UpSet Press) and Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press).
Bhakti Shringarpure is an Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has taught at Hunter College (CUNY), Baruch College (CUNY), Stern College for Women, and the University of Nairobi. She is the co-founder of Warscapes magazine which transitioned into the Radical Books Collective, a multi-faceted community building project that creates an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading. Bhakti is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (2017), Imagine Africa (2017) Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018), Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (2023).
Buy the book here: https://darajapress.com/publication/insurgent-feminism-writing-war

Amrita Ghosh talks to Kashmiri scholar and academic Hafsa Kanjwal her new book Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (2023). The episode presents Kashmir and its long conflict in a new narrative. Kanjwal resets the usual ways of understanding Kashmir’s past and looks at the immediate postcolonial years of 1950s and 1960s in which Kashmir was slowly integrated into India with various nation-building strategies. Kanjwal questions binary terms like colonial and postcolonial, and offers a way of rethinking the Partition as the dominant trope for understanding the conflict in Kashmir. She talks about the ways through which an idea of Kashmir was presented within frameworks of statist integration politics through film, tourism, pamphlets, the use of emotionality and affect, and through racial connotations of a Kashmiri identity. Ghosh and Kanjwal discuss the representation of Kashmir within contemporary cultural productions and the recent slew of Bollywood films and online series that are once again deploying Kashmir to erase and reframe conflict in specific ways.
Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023)
Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (Brill 2022) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (Cambridge Scholars 2012). Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books. She is the co-founding editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary journal.

In our 12th episode of Radical Publishing Futures, Nadine El-Hadi, senior acquisitions editor at Hoopoe Fiction joins Meg Arenberg from her office near Tahrir Square in Cairo. The discussion focuses on the special position of Hoopoe and the American University in Cairo Press as a pioneering publisher of Arabic literature in English translation that is also located in the Middle East North Africa region itself. The speak about the particular opportunities and challenges of publishing primarily translations, and the burden of shifting narratives of Arab culture and Islam that predominate in the West. Nadine also talks about the growing worldwide audience for translated literary fiction that has buoyed Hoopoe in its early years as a separate imprint of AUC Press, literary culture in Egypt, and the various paths by which a novel in Arabic ends up as an English title on Hoopoe’s list. The two discuss the stunning new translation of Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Koni’s latest novel, The Night Will Have its Say, which retells the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa, among other recent titles published at Hoopoe.
Nadine El-Hadi is senior acquisitions editor at American University in Cairo Press. She runs both the press’s Arabic Language Learning List as well as its fiction imprint, Hoopoe Press.

Novelist, essayist and master trilogist Nuruddin Farah is one of the most important contemporary authors working today. In a writing career that spans more than five decades, Farah has published thirteen novels, dozens of essays and plays, all of which critically engage various dimensions of Somali history, culture and politics. Farah wrote his first novel From a Crooked Rib in 1970 and has not looked back since and has since penned three trilogies: Variations on the Theme of African Dictatorship, the Blood in the Sun trilogy and then the Past Imperfect trilogy. He has famously declared that he writes about Somalia to “keep it alive” because, he says, “I live Somalia, I eat it, smell the death of it, the dust, daily.”
Farah is the winner of the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, Lettre Ulysses Award, Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Premio Cavour and St. Malo Literature Festival Prize, among others. In this conversation, writer and editor Bhakti Shringarpure of the Radical Books collective speaks with Farah about his life, his prolific writing career, his penchant for stylistic experimentation and what it means to be a writer whose works become representative of a country and its people, both in Somalia and abroad.
This conversation was hosted by Melahuset in Oslo (Norway) on September 28, 2023 to a live audience.

Cameroonian writer Léonora Miano joins guest host Greg Pierrot for the 10th episode of our Trailblazing African Feminists series. Miano was born in Doula, Cameroon and lived in France from 1991. She studied American literature at Nanterre university and this led her to African American and Caribbean writers that considerably influenced her work. She is the author of 16 books and the winner of prestigious awards such as as the Goncourt des Lycéens, Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire, Femina Prize, Grand Prix du Roman Métis, the latter both for Season of the Shadow, translated into English by Seagull Books (India). 
Miano is an important literary and media figure in Cameroon and France, and is known for her provocative feminist and anticolonial ideas and for her exploration and embrace of the concept of the Afropean identity. In this podcast, Miano tells the story of how she became a writer and speaks of her interest in the question of African origins for black communities in the Americas and Europe. She also touches upon the issue of belonging for Africans abroad, all of which are recurrent topics in her fiction and essays. Pierrot and Miano discuss the freedoms and limits of terms such as Afropean, Francophonie and contending with a glossary of Black identities. 
Greg Pierrot is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut (Stamford) and the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture and Decolonize Hipsters. 

Radical Publishing Futures returns with a conversation between Meg Arenberg and director of Feminist Press Margot Atwell. Margot offers some perspective on the pioneering role of the Feminist press and its interdisciplinary journal WSQ, not only for radical independent publishing in the US but for women and gender studies as an academic field, as well as its ongoing relationship with the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Meg and Margot also discuss the affinities between roller derby and feminist publishing, the special joys of working collaboratively with a small staff where everyone is involved in the acquisitions and editing processes, accessibility tools, and the work of building community with readers and indie bookstores alike.
Margot Atwell is a writer, editor, publisher, and community funding expert and before taking on the executive director role at Feminist Press just over a year ago, she directed publishing at Kickstarter and also worked previously at the independent publisher Beaufort Books, and founded and ran the micropress Gutpunch. Margot is the coauthor of The Insider’s Guide to Book Publishing Success (from Beaufort Books) and Derby Life: A Crash Course in the Incredible Sport of Roller Derby (from Gutpunch Press). 
Meg Arenberg is the managing editor for the Radical Books Collective.