Jim Crow in the USSR: How Langston Hughes saw the Soviet Union and how it changed my life
Langston Hughes (left) and Arthur Koestler (right), from A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (1932) by Langston HughesCourtesy Langston Hughes Papers, Yale University Library. Weareallcolonized.— marginalia in a library copy of Dominance Without Hegemony by Ranajit Guha, Indian historian.
Read full storyWhite Terrorism and Islamophobia: The Portland Stabbings of 2017
Robert E. Lee Monument after the Floyd Protests (2020) via WikiCommonsWikiCommons. Almost immediately after it emerged that a white supremacist had stabbed three men who were trying to prevent him from attacking Muslim women in a Portland train on 26 May 2017, killing two of them, the police force began to mitigate the brutality of what had happened.
Read full story3 New York Literary Agent Horror Stories
Having a literary agent is the dream of many writers. Countless blog posts, forums, and writers’ handbooks begin with the question: How do you get a literary agent? To these sources, it seems that all a writer needs to do is secure an agent, and every other problem, from finding a publisher to making a living as a writer, is solved.
Read full storyWhy a Muslim-American dissident read Henry David Thoreau in prison
Tarek Mehanna (Boston, MA)Christian Science Monitor. Often associated with nonviolent civil disobedience, Thoreau isn’t usually the first name that springs to mind when one thinks of violent resistance. Yet Thoreau was among the first names I came across when I began to research Muslim-Americans’ responses to the crackdown on their civil liberties following 9/11. The Egyptian-American Muslim Tarek Mehanna, who since 2012 has been incarcerated in a US Supermax for downloading and translating content deemed by the US government to constitute “material support” for al-Qaeda, cites Thoreau prolifically in his prison writings and drawings. (I have discussed Mehanna’s case in more detail here.)
Read full storyPalestine is a Litmus Test of Our Capacity to Change the World
Morning in GazaAya Isleem / Telegram (https://t.me/AyaIsleemen) The world’s attention has been transfixed by Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza. Palestinian voices and narratives have begun to filter through the mainstream American media channels that have suppressed their voices for decades. When the Israeli military bombed al-Jalaa Tower, which housed the Associated Press and Al Jazeera offices in Gaza on 15 May 2021, it seemed to mark a turning point in wider public opinion. On the day of that bombing, which followed the destruction of two other large residential buildings in Gaza, US Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Cori Bush tweeted a simple yet powerful message: “apartheid states aren’t democracies.”
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