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{Please support our work during the current KPFA Fund Drive by pledging online, or by calling 1-800-439-5732 (HEY-KPFA), during any ATG broadcast.}
Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison Stanford U. Press, 2007
Francophone poet, playwright, intellectual, and politician, Aimé Césaire was a fierce critic of the colonial condition and a modernist trailblazer. Scholar Natalie Melas considers the politics and poetics of the Martiniquan writer, arguably the greatest poet of anticolonialism and decolonization. She discusses Césaire's central involvement in the Négritude movement, his celebrated poem "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land," and his influence on Frantz Fanon.
Albena Azmanova, “The Crisis of the Crisis of Capitalism”
Albena Azmanova, "Crisis? Capitalism is Doing Very Well. How is Critical Theory?"
Albena Azmanova, The Scandal of Reason Columbia U. Press, 2012
Azmanova & Mihai, eds., Reclaiming Democracy Routledge, 2015
The Program in Critical Theory at U.C. Berkeley
Where does capitalism stand today? If the system is crisis-ridden and hasn't delivered the goods to large sectors of the population, why aren't we in a revolutionary moment? And what has happened to the neoliberal version of capitalism that first emerged in the 1970s? Albena Azmanova contends that we've entered a new stage of capitalism, one in which a few are handed opportunities and the rest are made to shoulder the risks.
Chris Dixon, Another Politics: Talking Across Today's Transformative Movements UC Press, 2014
Chris Dixon's website
From the shutdown of the WTO in Seattle to the Occupy movement, there's a highly influential current that has shaped how contemporary politics are conceived and organized. Activist and scholar Chris Dixon has delved deeply into anti-authoritarian, anticapitalist, and non-sectarian politics – perhaps the leading orientation for young radicals today. He discusses its vibrancy, as well as the problems that beset it, from strategy and organization to insularity and the assertion that there are no leaders. (Encore presentation.)
Kersten and Lang, eds., Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph NYU Press, 2015
Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color Harvard U. Press, 2001
Eric Arnesen, The Black Worker U. of Illinois Press, 2007
A. Philip Randolph famously led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, but he did much more than that. Eric Arnesen traces Randolph's emergence as a militant socialist at a time when few Blacks were attracted to the Socialist Party and its emphasis on class. Arnesen also discusses Randolph's relationship with Eugene Debs and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Suzanne Mettler, Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream Basic Books, 2014
For-profit colleges market themselves to veterans and low-income, often African American, students who ultimately find themselves with little to show for their efforts beyond mountains of debt. Contrary to their image, they are massively subsidized by US taxpayers, while turning a handsome profit for their shareholders. Political scientist Suzanne Mettler discusses the federal funding of higher education and the political support, by Democrats and Republicans, of for-profit colleges.