The Dig

After listening to the 40 hours of Thawra, I cannot but thank Dan and all The Dig radio team for putting together this inspiring and brilliant series. The story told by the guest, Abdel Razzaq Takriti, is the story of colonization and resistance in the Middle East, focusing on the twentieth century but giving enough historical context to make the audience understand why things developed the way they did. Razzaq Takriti makes available to the non-Arabic English-speaking audience a story that otherwise would be impossible to know at such depth and which (oh surprise!) resembles to that of other regions in the Third World such as Latin America. I particularly appreciate how the specificities of the Arab world are contextualized in a larger conversation and how the incredible in-depth historical analysis is complemented with some allusions to Arabic literature and culture. This series is an indispensable piece to understand what is happening in Palestine today and what is the role of the global left in it (other great episodes of The Dig about the Middle East and the Muslim world are the interviews with Ussama Makdisi and Tariq Ali); it also demonstrates what a powerful political and pedagogical tool a podcast can be, and how dialogue and conversation is in itself an epistemological device to understand the past.

Thawra stands head and shoulders above all podcasts on recent Arab history. Please accept my humble thanks. If I could afford it, I would definitely support you more.

important listening and i have learned a lot from the content and work to contextualize movements. but the gender disparity in guests (who tend to hail from an in-crowd of jacobin and boston review adjacent micro-celebrities) can get depressing. the left is bigger than this. i listen in small doses. i would happily support on patreon if there were more steps taken around gender parity.

I was really happy to see the Sunaura Taylor episode. Unfortunately animal liberation does seem to get ignored on the left and it’s an extremely urgent political and ethical issue. I’d love to hear an interview with Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel on The Dig! His book Animals and Capital applies Marx’s value theory to animal labor in capitalist food production.