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

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“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

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“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...

“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...

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...

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, books, essays, reports, speeches, music, art, comics, radio, conversations, and more. His work goes against the grain of institutionalized forms of writing and allows for an excavation of political, historical and literary narratives that have been deliberately buried, obfuscated and redirected.

Our conversation was wide-ranging, yet focused on historicizing and contextualizing the present moment as genocide continues in Palestine, as American universities unravel with shocking speed, and as the grip of authoritarianism and fascism tightens worldwide. When it comes to Palestine, Alcalay reflects on past events that have created the material conditions for the genocide to take place with full global complicity, all in the bright light of day.

From 2018 onwards, he says, the world has been in a state of immense tumult, with demonstrations in Lebanon, Chile, Columbia, Hong Kong playing out alongside the Hirak protests in Algeria and the Great March of Return in Gaza.

“Suddenly, boom, coronavirus - everything shuts down," Alcalay says. "Enormous freedom of movement curtailed.”

He adds that Gaza was very much on his mind as he realized that these social movements and their ensuing suppression would create resounding and long-lasting reverberations that would likely become compounded in Gaza. He was right. It is clear, as he says: “We're all heading to Gaza. That's the model for the world.”

The “Gaza model” evokes what Aime Cesaire called the “imperial boomerang” whereby empire’s violence abroad inescapably boomerangs its way back home. Examples abound as terrorizing ICE agents roam the streets in the US and brutal practices of incarceration in North America, Europe and Asia mimic Israel to a fault.

For Alcalay, however, one has to go even further back to understand the “Gaza model.”

“The war in Iraq is a gaping hole in US behavior, thought, culture, politics, etc. It’s like a blast crater, and so many of the things that have been happening in Gaza -- withholding of food -- all of that happened in Iraq, was done by the US, and they killed hundreds of thousands. And the general culture has no clue whatsoever about any of that.”

To a large degree, American wars in the Gulf, and the amount of violence inflicted on Iraq through sanctions and “shock and awe,” have rarely penetrated the public psyche. Gaza has shocked the world, Alcalay explains, not only because these forms of brutalization have been obscured from the public, but also because of the horrifying speed and quantity with which they are being deployed. And simultaneously, the culture of protests has also changed over the years. The protests trying to stop the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 lacked the immediacy and collectivity that was present during the war in Vietnam, proving that modes of control and surveillance have successfully proliferated. The vicious and swift suppression of pro-Palestinian protests in the last two years is proof.

Despite these sombre assessments, Alcalay continues writing, translating and teaching. He has been buoyed by the success of Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, since Alcalay was instrumental in bringing him to an American audience. In particular, he has been furiously translating and collaborating creatively with writers in Gaza.

“This is a big year for books,” Alcalay says. He co-translated Nasser Rabah’s poems, and...

“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 and art into one work. The author and his team of photographers undertook a culinary journey across Sudan and took the time to sit down with members of different communities across the country to learn about their food. The book thus becomes a testament to the resilience, resistance and creativity of Sudanese people who keep their traditions alive despite having to endured decades of strife.

Originally from Khartoum but having grown up in the UK, Omer found himself listless at the food options during his university years. They were “not feeding my soul.” And unfortunately, there was no Sudanese restaurant to be found. This is when he started to teach himself to cook the food he had always known in his Sudanese home. He would nag his mother and aunts to give him recipes, and would patiently attempt to recreate dishes based on somewhat haphazard, intuitive instructions. Over time, Omer realized that he was on to something and the collecting of recipes transformed into a more ambitious endeavor.

When Omar Al-Bashir’s regime fell in 2018, and Sudan erupted into revolt, Omer took off to Khartoum to participate in the protests and to also pursue what was now definitely turning into a book. This moment of transition that lasted a couple of years was filled with hope. “It was an energizing period,” Omer says, and one that he touches on several times in his book in an attempt “to keep the revolution alive.” He knows that these are important memories “given the state that we're in now where we have this two years long war.”

Sudanese Kitchen opens with a photograph of a mural memorializing a young martyr and the following page carries a dedication to all the martyrs of the December 2018 revolution and to the family members who “nourished the bodies and minds of Sudanese youth.” Right away, Omer grounds his book in the connected nature of revolution, liberation and Sudanese practices of food and sustenance. As the book progresses, vivid color photographs of landscapes, foods and markets are interspersed with infographics and lists. There is a timeline of key events in Sudanese culinary history that outline the important moments of agricultural history as well as a map of its current agricultural landscape. There is an inventory which lists all the main ingredients used in Sudanese cuisine as well as an illustrated glossary for pantry items, cooking utensils, Sudanese terminology and even some proverbs.

Along the way, Omer weaves together the story of his family with the history of contemporary Sudan. Every few pages of recipes is punctuated by short autobiographical sketches. He starts with his early childhood in Khartoum and then recounts the difficulties of migration to Britain. At university, Omer embarked on his cooking journey. He started making trips to Sudan in 2018 and with two photographers in tow, the group systematically documented, prepared and photographed the dishes for over a year. Long road trips took them to the Nuba mountains and also deep into Al Fashir, and they made several stops to talk to people and to record recipes and cooking styles.

In Sudanese Kitchen, food becomes a lens, a theory, a history, an aesthetic, and a manifesto. Despite the beauty of the book, it does not make for easy digestion (pun intended). It insists on political engagement and demands an interest in Sudan’s history, geography and...

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 of aid is blocked, as is happening now in Gaza, there is a war of stories.”

All of Singh’s work emphasizes the importance of writing back to these narratives and thus refusing those stories. Her recent story collection, Refuge: Stories of War (and Love), attempts to decenter the traditional war narrative by focusing on women’s perspectives. The stories are sparse, moving reflections on violence and suffering.

At a stylistic level, the new collection might seem like a departure from Singh’s previous object of study: Bollywood cinema. But Singh argues that her writing on Bollywood comes from this same place of anti-colonial politics.

Her 2023 book A Bollywood State of Mind: A Journey into the World’s Biggest Cinema is a memoir, but it is also an homage to the world’s oldest film industry. Singh offers an intimate glimpse into her own peripatetic childhood and youth, punctuated by songs from Hindi movies, family conversations about films, as well as happy memories of going to the cinema. As an adult, Singh was shocked to see the prejudice— even disdain— around scholarly writing about Bollywood. The scholars would insist on a very academic, objective, and neutral view, and Singh says that this “kind of demand is never made of a Hollywood scholar, or a French or Italian cinema scholar.”

Singh wanted to write about Bollywood through an “emotional core” while paying attention to how “stories work” and “how they impact people and how they impact culture.” She believes that Bollywood historically had an anti-colonial impulse, even though some of today’s overtly nationalist cinema is disconcerting and needs to be critiqued. Unfortunately, “empire is built into the [Indian] nation state's DNA,” Singh says.

Singh’s commitment to amplifying stories and storytellers that are marginalized in the mainstream is also evident in her founding of the Jhalak prize, an annual literary prize awarded to BAME writers (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) who are residents of Britain. Fed up with all-white juries, all-white longlists, and the false refrain about the lack of Black or brown writers, Singh decided to found a prize dedicated to her grandmother, whose words were an inspiration to her as a girl: “If you see something wrong, fix it.”

The prize is now ten years old, but it has been an uphill battle to get mainstream media to even cover it. They also had a member of parliament who even accused them of racism. But Singh laughs it off and soldiers on. “The issue is not individuals, it's the structure. I'm interested in knocking down the structure.”

Singh says that almost 40% of children in the UK are now from a minority ethnic background, and publishing books by writers of color is urgent. “Every time that child reads a book that features someone like them, that features their family, that features their story, that's one kid who's had a little chip out of that imperial propaganda worldview knocked out. That's a child who's had one tiny taste of freedom.”

Further reading: https://www.sunnysingh.net/

Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes

Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat

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