Radical Futures

Bhakti Shringarpure
  • 5.0 (2)
  • SOCIETY & CULTURE

An invitation to imagine freedom, decolonization and liberatory futures.

  1. Complaint Activism, Killjoy Feminism, and the Power of NO! Featuring Sara Ahmed

    APR 16

    Complaint Activism, Killjoy Feminism, and the Power of NO! Featuring Sara Ahmed

    “Complaints often get us to the politics of how the institution works. And that's how I've tried to see it - as a lens into the institution.” Writer, scholar and activist Sara Ahmed learned the harsh truth about academic institutions over a decade ago. When a group of students and feminist faculty collectively complained about sexual harassment at their institution - Goldsmiths, University of London - a suite of deflective actions from the university ensured that the complaint never saw light of day and that the harassers stayed protected. In what became a long, drawn out battle against the institution, Ahmed fiercely advocated for all those who complained, and eventually blew the whistle on the university. The atmosphere turned so hostile and abusive towards her that it became untenable to work there and Ahmed resigned. When the resignation became public and the practices of the university were exposed, Ahmed was flooded with stories from all over the world. People wrote to her sharing that they had gone through something similar: They had been harassed, their complaints had been blocked, and some had even lost their jobs. “And that's actually what enabled the research,” Ahmed explains. “It was the kind of connections that are possible when we disclose information that professionalism tells us to keep hidden.” Saying “No” to her institution allowed Ahmed “to be part of a political movement that was not bound by one specific institution, but was actually thinking about what are these structural problems that are not being dealt with.” Ahmed’s book, NO! The Art and Activism of Complaining, published by Feminist Press (New York, 2026) is an astounding analytical work that exposes the deep rot within institutions of all types. Workplaces in most professions are hotbeds of injustice and oppression, and disproportionately impact women, queer and trans people, people of color, and people with disabilities. NO! emerges from research compiled over several years, as people began telling Ahmed their stories of sexual harassment, racism, sexism, transphobia and ableism in the workplace. Ahmed became a friend, teacher, parent, activist, therapist and scholar all rolled into one, and cultivated what she called a “feminist ear” in order to listen to and learn from grievances, reports and complaints. Institutional violence, Ahmed found, was a structure not an event, and is continually replicated by those in power in order to keep themselves in power. The complaint can be one way in which this unchecked power can be disrupted, exposed, and sometimes even ruptured. In NO! Ahmed offers an anatomy of a complaint: what happens when it's made, how it travels within the system, which complaint is repressed and which is quickly resolved, who complies, who resists, who benefits, and who is cast out. Ahmed believes that it is nearly impossible for an official complaint to ever become a vehicle for justice, but it is the act of complaining that is ultimately invaluable. The complaint itself, and the solidarities that emerge when a complaint is out there, becomes a tool for power mapping; a means of understanding exactly where power lies, who holds it, and how it moves. Along the way, it exposes the administrators who are invested in preserving the status quo despite pretending to care about helping the person being harassed. In this wide-ranging conversation with Bhakti Shringarpure, Ahmed discusses the art and activism of complaining by taking apart the nuts and bolts of workplace culture that purports to do one thing, but often does the exact opposite. She interrogates the nature of professionalism, the push for confidentiality, the culture of open secrets, hollow (non) performative gestures, the faux interest in diversity, gender and disability justice, and the institutional gaslighting of the persons who complain about being harassed. In fact, the last years of genocide in Palestine have proven just how low institutions have sunk. Complaints have been manufactured in order to justify the disciplining, harassment and the firing of people who have been outspoken about Palestine. “So I think that everything you do because you do not believe that it is okay to genocide a people can be used against you,” Ahmed says. “The very language of oppression can be used against you. The very language of being a victim can be used against you. Identity politics can be used against you. Universalism can be used against you. Anything can be used against you.” Ahmed thinks it's time to get louder and more creative. This might mean turning your complaint into a placard or a prayer or a poster, or even a post-it, where it can be seen. Complaints may not become instruments of justice, but they can be deployed to raise consciousness. “We're in a time of grotesque imperial wars,” Ahmed says. “We have to keep complaining and keep protesting.” Buy NO! The Art and Activism of Complaining here: https://feministpress.org/products/9781558613683-no Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat Subscribe | Follow www.radicalbookscollective.com

    1h 5m
  2. Love, Freedom, Feminism, and Keeping Dalit Life Intact: Featuring Nikhil Pandhi

    APR 4

    Love, Freedom, Feminism, and Keeping Dalit Life Intact: Featuring Nikhil Pandhi

    A story about love can “unspool the complexities of caste,” says Nikhil Pandhi, the editor of Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist Anthology of Love Stories published by Zubaan Books, an indie feminist press based in India. Such stories not only serve to give space to the rich, inner lives of Dalit communities but they can be an important resource for anyone who is keen to understand caste. “Rather than quoting an academic treatise, I felt like it is just much easier for them to read a short story,” says Pandhi. A collection of 17 stories from across India, Love in the Time of Caste makes love the prism through which one can observe, absorb, and critique caste regimes in India. The book powerfully illustrates the ways in which the violence of casteism permeates all aspects of social relations while simultaneously structuring Dalit lives, psyches and sociality too. Unsurprisingly, these are not sappy love stories with happy endings. Rather, “this is love that is anchored in embodied violence that is so real” that even dreaming, fantasizing and desiring can become perilous. Caste is necropolitical, says Pandhi, but the writers in the book rearrange those desires and reframe circuits of connection and belonging. The stories span a wide range of themes, certainly love but also revenge, inter-caste and intra-caste relationships, heartbreak, healing, toxic masculinity, Dalit women’s agency, the absence of childhood, and, quite often, quests for freedom. Pandhi states that the stories attempt to explore different ways of inhabiting love. Even the conversation on love “is so saturated by heterosexism and a hetero-patriarchal Brahmanical understanding that it's hard to even get at it.” To unravel this knot requires a subversion of these norms from within. One goal of the collection was to “rethink Dalits as passionate subjects and Dalit life as capable, in a very critical fashion, of generating new ways of affiliation.” Anchoring these reflections on love is a deeply considered anti-caste, Dalit feminism that is stitched into the fabric of every single story in the book. Pandhi defines anti-caste, Dalit feminism as “a rejection of Brahmanical norms, Brahmanical sensitivities and sensibilities around touch, around intimacy, around how desire should be performed, around this obsession with respectability politics, around expressions and economies of flesh.” Yet it is not defined by negation but by its capaciousness and creativity. Pandhi says that he has twenty pen drives of unpublished love stories and he believes this is intrinsically connected to “Dalit feminism as a creative and critical project that is expanding outwards, that is global in its scope, that is looking at global feminisms, but is very conscious of the fact that it also represents something that has a frictious relationship with what is normative feminism in the Indian context.” In the foreword to the anthology, writer Anita Bharti asks what keeps Dalit life intact despite the excess of violence, harm, injury and humiliation being meted out on a daily basis? Pandhi believes that Bharti’s prescient question is “urging us to think about the fact that hope or that compassion, that maitri, emerges because there is a very intimate understanding of what pain is, what pain does. And one of the things that vedana or pain does is it also potentializes chetana. It also potentializes consciousness. Consciousness is only known to someone who actually knows.” Buy the book: Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist anthology of love stories edited and translated by Nikhil Pandhi https://zubaanbooks.com/shop/love-in-the-time-of-caste-a-dalit-feminist-anthology-of-love-stories/ Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat Subscribe | Follow www.radicalbookscollective.com

    50 min
  3. Queer, Palestinian and Decolonial: Featuring Tareq Baconi

    MAR 23

    Queer, Palestinian and Decolonial: Featuring Tareq Baconi

    “I had always placed my queer identity and my Palestinian identity in different buckets,” admits writer Tareq Baconi. This changed when he began writing his memoir, Fire in Every Direction, a first-person account of young Tareq, a Palestinian boy living in Jordan and gradually coming to terms with his sexuality. “Through the writing of this book, and as I became more involved in Palestine organizing, I realized that this separation is obviously a false separation,” Baconi says. “Not only that, I began to understand that I came to Palestine through a queer lens, and specifically through my experience of identifying as queer in Jordan, sort of breaking apart or resisting these hegemonic structures that are placed on us.” Fire in Every Direction is Baconi’s second book, and it is a surprising pivot. His first book, Hamas Contained:The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, was a scholarly work rather than a personal and intimate reflection. The memoir positions coming out as gay and coming out as Palestinian as deeply connected journeys. Along the way, it also reframes and expands the “coming out” trope, the moment when an individual discloses their queer orientation. Queer coming of age stories often position the “coming out” as a triumphant finale, but Baconi’s book instead focuses on the long road ahead for a gay Arab man, showing that the Westernized coming out framing is not one-size-fits-all and requires recalibration, depending on the culture one belongs to. Fire in Every Direction is a unique and timely book, published at a time when settler colonial violence in Palestine refuses to abate. “It's heightened in this moment of genocide, when you understand actually that what's happening in Gaza is because decolonization of the globe or pushing back against empire and colonialism in the West is unfinished business,” he says. By embracing and embodying the intersections between queer and Palestinian identity, Baconi’s memoir offers a true path to decolonial and liberatory futures. Further reading: Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Baconi Hamas Contained:The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance by Tareq Baconi

    50 min
  4. The Ballot as Battleground: Featuring Anjali Enjeti

    FEB 11

    The Ballot as Battleground: Featuring Anjali Enjeti

    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 tremendous barriers,” especially for Black, brown or Indigenous Democrat voters. Enjeti’s recent book, Ballot, is a history of voting in the US, and it certainly delivers. However, along the way, the book equally exposes a corrupt and manipulative system that destabilizes democracy by making it harder for people to physically go and vote. Being a Democratic voter living in the state of Georgia offers a particularly important vantage point, in her case. “I've been gerrymandered out of districts that I helped flip blue in 2018. I've seen it. I felt it. My dropbox for my absentee ballot was closed down. It used to be close to my house,” she says, “now it's 30 minutes away. I was directly impacted, as many voters have been, who live in these red, Republican-led states that have been enacting a cascade of laws.” With almost no oversight from the federal government, she adds, these laws “have a wide berth of destruction.” Even as the Republican party has been shamelessly and strategically enacting such destruction for decades, she says, Enjeti is unsparing in her criticism of the Democratic party. She admits that while there were more checks and balances that affected both Republicans and Democrats at some point in time, the Democratic Party today is entirely overrun by corporate interests. Democrats are neither able to counter the vile and dehumanizing rhetoric deployed by the Republicans, nor effect a bulwark of opposition to their policies. “There's something ingrained in Democrats about the fact that they want to be friends with extremists,” she says. “They want to erase themselves and their belief system because they feel that that will get them the ability to be elected again…They care more about donations from billionaires for their next election than they do about actually serving in office. They will watch Palestinian babies being blown up and vote for more weapons going to Israel because they care more about the belief that that will get them reelected than they do about the fact that we've had some of the largest protests in this country since the Vietnam War for a ceasefire, for stopping the armament of Israel.” In her book, Enjeti wanted to give readers a sense of the magnitude of this moment and the role of elections, but she is aware that voting is only one element in a vast political ecosystem. “I have been a progressive activist for many years, so I've actually never felt that elections paved the way to liberation,” she tells me. “We've got strikers. We've got protesters. We've got people boycotting corporations. We've got a big mix of tools in our toolbox, and voting is one of them. We need to not have the police, we need to not have ICE, but we can hold that and understand that we've got to have the abolitionists and then we've got to have the people doing something about elections. We have to hold these multiple roles at the same time, and elections are still very important.” Further reading: Ballot by Anjali Enjeti https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ballot-9798765126202/ Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari. Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat Subscribe | Follow www.radicalbookscollective.com

    49 min
  5. Is Satire Dead? Featuring Gado

    FEB 4

    Is Satire Dead? Featuring Gado

    “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 hold his attention, and he landed a job at The Daily Nation, Kenya’s leading daily and one of the largest newspapers in Africa. He took off for Nairobi, young and alone but eager to learn. He felt he was lucky to find mentors and an environment that was open to his ideas and creativity. Over his many years working for The Daily Nation, Gado boasts of having offended every possible powerful person in Kenya, as well as in the broader African continent. “I have no regrets,” he says, despite having endured threats, silencing attempts and high-pressure backdoor negotiations which found presidents, ministers and businessmen demanding accommodations. “I am one of those people who has a knack for disrespecting authority,” he jokes. But Gado has a steadfast commitment to his work, and believes that provocations via satire “enrich the debate and bring to the table ideas and things that we are afraid to discuss.” But when it comes to poking fun, how far is too far? I ask. “I remain true to the principles of satire,” Gado replies.“One of the things about good satire is it doesn't punch downward. You always punch upward. And so, in a situation like Gaza, you won't do a cartoon to laugh at Palestinians. It would be ridiculous. But that does not mean you shouldn't do drawings on what is happening in Gaza, because satire remains a medium that should delight, it should poke fun, it should educate, and it should also punch upward in the sense that satire should always afflict the powerful and not the minorities and the marginalized.” The rapidly evolving global media landscape has brought about a shift in how media is consumed. The decrease in print runs of newspapers has meant that fewer and fewer editorial cartoonists are being hired, while the advent of streaming services and video-based social media has also meant a decline in viewership of satirical late night talk shows. Gado believes that “satire is in turmoil in many countries” due to a political climate dominated by right-wing movements, censorship and “cancel” culture. But he remains hopeful: “I might not have answers in terms of ‘the how’ and what are we going to have in the next 10 years, but I'm very confident that it will survive. Satire still remains a very powerful tool to speak truth to power.” Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari. Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes Title Music: "Cottonstorm" by Bayern Boom Beat Subscribe | Follow https://www.radicalbookscollective.com/

    42 min
  6. ICE, A Bipartisan Tale of Border Imperialism: Featuring Harsha Walia

    JAN 21

    ICE, A Bipartisan Tale of Border Imperialism: Featuring Harsha Walia

    “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 Ábrego García were early signs that an escalation in abductions and brutalization was coming. ICE now appears to be wielding spectacular levels of power and unleashing daily violence on a new scale. Walia, who has followed and written about borders and migrations for several years, is horrified at what she is seeing but not entirely surprised by this escalation. Walia wants to broaden the scope of this conversation. Today ICE “is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States. In fact, its budget outpaces many militaries of the world.” But even before there was ICE, the core function of any border regime is to “enforce borders, to enact deportation and detention, and to escalate border enforcement in different places.” This escalation can occur at the border itself as with US border with Mexico or as a maritime build-up with the Caribbean or “inland” which means within neighborhoods and within the so-called territory of the US. “Even though at different times, the spectacle and horror is different, the ideology and premise is the same, which is to terrorize migrant communities and to enact detention and deportation...It is not to always deport people, but it's to make them more vulnerable to employers and to the social context in which migrants live.” In offering a brief history of ICE, Walia stresses the bipartisan nature of the agency. It was created by George W. Bush in 2003 in the aftermath of 9/11. “An immensely violent and large agency,” ICE comes out in a moment “when the war on terror was increasingly merged with the war on migrants.” But she argues that it is the Clinton administration that “laid the ground for border militarization as we know today. And that was by putting in millions of dollars to securitize the border, all of these different operations in California and Arizona and Texas to basically make it so that crossing the border became a matter of life and death for people.” The Obama and Biden administrations have followed suit and have been instrumental in harnessing brutal bordering practices, a key element of which has been the externalization of the border. They have poured billions of dollars on “border enforcement into other countries, which is why now Mexico has a much larger detention and deportation system than the United States, because the US has outsourced its violence to countries in South and Central America.” None of this takes away from the fact that Trump has taken it to new levels by putting thousands of ICE patrols on the streets, by pausing US visa applications from 75 countries, and by giving leeway for hate speech and racism against migrants. Walia warns against exceptionalizing Trump’s villainy because “Trump did not create this entire administration or structure. All of the infrastructure that goes into border enforcement predates him.” Additionally, Trump is part of a global trend, “whether it is the escalation of Zionism and Zionist and genocidal violence, the escalation in India and of Brahminical Hindutva forces, and we can look at other parts of Europe where this is happening.” Walia rightly points out that even if the American empire collapses today, countries like India and UAE will push the same horrible agendas. Thus regardless of American hegemony, “there is no denying that transnational accumulation, capitalist accumulation and empire-making is no longer the domain of the imperial core. Even if these are sub-imperialisms, they're advancing at a rate that is unfathomable and causing violence on people's lives and misery for people in ways that are unfathomable.” Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg because “there are over 17,000 agencies that have jurisdiction over migrants in the United States.” Any of these could be empowered if ICE is gone. “So it's about understanding that it's not about abolishing ICE. It's about abolishing the system and the power that ICE upholds.” Further reading: Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1553-border-and-rule Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat Subscribe | Follow www.radicalbookscollective.com

    46 min
  7. Venezuela and the Long View: Featuring Geo Maher

    JAN 7

    Venezuela and the Long View: Featuring Geo Maher

    “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 Maduro by the United States shocked the world. Maher is disturbed by the speed with which the situation is moving, but has been well aware that “something was coming,” he tells me. He has written two books on Venezuela, a country that captured his imagination many years ago partially because he instinctively knew that when it came to Venezuela, he was being lied to. He decided to go see for himself and was bowled over by the mass mobilization movements that brought the charismatic Hugo Chavez to power and longstanding grassroots efforts of the Venezuelan people to take back their country from a greedy and corrupt capitalist system. In this conversation, Maher offers a long view on a maligned and misunderstood country. The US obsession with Venezuela goes way back. While this current conflagration is certainly about oil, it is also due to the fact that US settler ambitions have been consistently thwarted by Latin American independence movements going as far back as the type of resistance mounted by Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar in the 19th century. In recent years, it is not just the desire for oil, but the competition for this very oil (currently available to Russia and China) that has driven the US' aggressive political project in the country. Meanwhile, Venezuelan resistance to this imperial violence is the subject of lore. Despite sustained efforts to vilify Hugo Chavez and to mount and fund various coups against him while painting him as a crazy dictator, the grassroots movements remain strong. Maduro may not be as popular or as powerful a politician as Chavez, but Maher says that it is precisely the fetishization of individual figures like Maduro - the eccentric, the rabid narcoterrorist - that obscures insights. “It was this obsession with this single individual, as if a single individual could ever make a revolution, which was not the case - or that a single individual would be ultimately in control of something so sprawling as the Venezuelan state.” Today, people are suffering due to “the major contradiction of the oil economy, which still plagues the Venezuelan state today,” says Maher. “Because of oil, nothing is produced. It's very difficult in the context of an oil economy to produce the things that people actually need. As long as you're reliant on that oil money and those imports, you are politically vulnerable to imperialism and to the global capitalist system.” Despite different chronologies, regional specificities and frameworks, comparisons with Iraq ring loudly and true. Unhinged American colonialism, an obsession with oil, brutal swathes of sanctions and several wars in Iraq make it a striking analogy to understand Venezuela. In Iraq, there were fake arguments about WMD, and in the case of Venezuela, Maduro is being charged with narco-terrorism and a drummed-up fentanyl crisis (Venezuela does not produce fentanyl). There is no basis for the drug charges being brought against Maduro, Maher says. In fact, “they're already backing off the claim that the Cartel de los Soles even exists.” Maher adds that one of the charges - “possessing machine guns” - is particularly laughable. “You're charging a head of state with the possession of machine guns. This is one of the most bizarre things that I've seen.” What’s clear is that it will be a long road ahead for Venezuelans and the region as a whole. It is also becoming clearer that none of this will necessarily prove easy for Trump, Marco Rubio and the rest of Trump’s cronies, who have almost certainly bitten off more than they can chew. Maher retains faith in the people of Venezuela. Today, when the definition of democracy appears diseased and flaccid, he sees the Venezuelan people’s movements as a blueprint for ushering in what could be a radical democratic structure. There is no way to predict how this situation will unfold, but when it comes to Venezuela, Maher’s convinced of one thing: “Any kind of occupying force will be doomed.” Further reading: --We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution https://dukeupress.edu/we-created-chavez -- Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela https://www.versobooks.com/products/147-building-the-commune Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes Title Music: "Cottonstorm" by Bayern Boom Beat Subscribe | Follow https://www.radicalbookscollective.com/

    48 min
  8. Palestinian Recipes Against Erasure: Featuring Lama Obeid

    12/18/2025

    Palestinian Recipes Against Erasure: Featuring Lama Obeid

    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 begins by explaining the disruptions in the food supply chain amid frequent raids in the Jenin refugee camp, for example, and Palestinian cities being cordoned off from one another. The immediate effect of this is that Israeli produce proliferates in the market, and often these foodstuffs turn out to be settlement products that are labeled as Israeli. The genocide in Gaza has completely collapsed the existing system. Even during the 18 years of brutal blockade, Gaza produced its own food. Strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, seafood and other produce was even allowed from Gaza into the West Bank. Over the last two years, fresh produce has become a priceless commodity. Processed food is everywhere, and Lama reports that, in addition to canned beef and beans, which have been a staple of UN rations, “unfortunately, there are things that even I've never seen canned before.” Lama is horrified about the distribution of canned boiled eggs and canned chicken, for example, all of which are probably “zero percent healthy.” Palestinian food was always political. Cookbooks often emphasize the impact of the longstanding occupation and attempt to preserve and archive recipes with a sense of urgency - archiving under fire. But the sense of urgency has become the norm, and the genre of the traditional cookbook has been replaced by something different - food bloggers and writers who double up as journalists reporting on the genocide using food as lens. Mona Zahed’s book Tabkha is actually subtitled Recipes from Under the Rubble. Lama reminds us that Zahid from Gaza was displaced with her family and “wrote this cookbook during her displacement to document also the family recipes, and also to try to support her family.” The documented recipes in Tabkha work against erasure in terms of archiving the heritage, but the cookbook is also a way for her family to literally survive the imminent threat of erasure. Food bloggers have become popular over the course of the two-year genocide, and many use these platforms to raise funds for their families. Renad Atallah was only 9 years old when she gained a large following after making cooking videos, smiling radiantly even as bombs rained down and ingredients became more and more scarce. Similarly Hamada Shaqoura began posting videos of himself cooking and distributing food to children. His videos have a tongue-in-cheek humor as he glowers at the camera while stirring vats of food. His humorous affect alongside images of large quantities of food work against the stereotypes of wretchedness and emaciation. Palestinian cuisine and gastronomy are no longer confined to preserving heritage or exploring culinary tradition, but rather are about capturing the nitty-gritty of survival in wartime. Lama points out that, even as these chefs write or blog about these recipes, they have no ingredients to actually make them, and they “unfortunately, are not eating these recipes. So what is being documented now in Gaza are the basic staples, very basic staples, and what we would call ‘war food,’ or the food made from rations.” There are very few silver linings, but at a time where everything and everybody have been exposed, Lama is relieved to note that there is no tolerance for the ways in which Palestinian food has been appropriated and normalized as Israeli food. Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi, for example, has collaborated with Palestinian chefs, thus giving the impression that this is one cuisine and one shared heritage and thereby obscuring the violence of the occupation. But now, Lama says, such collaborations have stopped. As a third generation Palestinian refugee displaced from the town of Ein Karem in West Jerusalem, Lama continues writing about food with a proudly Palestinian and sharp, political lens. Lama is fatigued by the Israeli-Palestinian debates around food and believes that the solution lies in turning her gaze to the past and diving into many untranslated Arabic works about food, because Palestinians have always made attempts to “record their own cuisine.” Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat Subscribe | Follow www.radicalbookscollective.com

    39 min
See All (27)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

An invitation to imagine freedom, decolonization and liberatory futures.

Information

  • Creator
    Bhakti Shringarpure
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    27
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Bhakti Shringarpure
  • Show Website
    Radical Futures

You Might Also Like