The Lit Review Podcast

It’s a wrap for Season 3! In 8 episodes, we went deep on topics including colonization and land justice, civil rights history, and movement and organizing fundamentals. And in the midst of the pandemic, uprising, and elections, we did our best to highlight the amazing resistance work happening in Chicago. There’s no special guest on this season finale- just your favorite co-hosts chopping it up to share their highlights and lingering questions. We also have updates about what to expect for Season 4 and how you can help us make it the best season of The Lit Review yet! We’ll be back with new episodes this Summer. Until then, check out any of our past episodes, recommend us to a friend, and KEEP READING! See links to action items, book shoutouts, and transcription at thelitreview.org

This is our last episode of Season 3 and it does not disappoint! To close out 2020, we’re discussing the book From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement by Luke Cole & Sheila Foster. This short but dense book focuses on the history of the Environmental Justice movement leading up to the signing of the 1994 Executive Order on Environmental Justice by President Clinton, and then outlines several examples of community efforts to resist environmental racism in the 1990s. We are so grateful to our guest this week, Juliana Pino Alcaraz, Policy Director at the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, for sharing her eco-expertise and movement thoughts with us. In this episode, Juliana breaks down the frameworks, organizational structures, tactics, and campaign strategies outlined in the book, and expands on what’s missing. This is a longer episode because we just couldn’t cut any of this brilliance! Grab a notebook and get settled in! Audio Production by B. Russelburg Episode Intro Music: “Chicago” by David Ellis

Despite some truly 2020-style audio recording issues, our 2nd to last episode of the season is here! First off the bat, peep our pre-episode plug with the homies Daniel & Damon of AirGo Radio! We hope you’re listening to our podcast episodes back-to-back every week! Then to the full episode, we have our guest, Christian Snow of Assata’s Daughters and the People’s Law Office, share her love and key takeaways from the book Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America. We often only hear the civil rights movement narrative between the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, or also known as the ‘Montgomery to Memphis’ framework. That historical narrative emphasizes a story of national organizations, charismatic leadership, policy change and mass mobilizations. Groundwork unearths the buried stories of the people, places, and struggles that laid the foundation for the movement. This is a detailed book that explores the common threads of what people did and how they did it, and insists on the value of exploring this work that never made national headlines or classroom textbooks. Audio Production by B. Russelburg Intro music featuring ‘Chicago’ by David Ellis

Fannie Lou Hamer is increasingly recognized for her leadership with the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, but did you know about the 600-acre Freedom Farm Cooperative she started? This is one of many examples of Black farmers organizing for power and self-determination highlighted in Monica White’s book “Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement.” This book expands our understanding of freedom struggles by focusing on the projects and tactics of Black farmers: from cooperatives and encampments, to unions and bail funds. Over and over, White documents the critical contributions farmers made both to literally feed the movement and also grow its liberation efforts. Vivi Moreno is the perfect guest to nerd out for an hour with about food, farming, and freedom. In this episode, she helps us understand and appreciate the long history of agricultural resistance, and also recognize and apply it to the ongoing struggles we still face today for healthy, sustainable, and self-determining communities. See Key questions discussed in this episode & Vivi Moreno's bio at thelitreview.org!

This was a hard book to talk about, but we’re so glad that we did. The late Gloria Anzaldúa’s book “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza” is beloved to many and considered a fundamental text in Chicana and Latinx studies. With gorgeous prose, she richly captures the unique experiences of those who inhabit the borderlands; of place, gender, class, and identity. Anzaldúa's book offers a poetic description of what it’s like to be caught between worlds. At the same time, this work is rightly called-out for those that it erases: Black, Indigenous, and trans people —all also existing and resisting in the borderlands. We were lucky to have Trina Reynolds-Tyler of the Invisible Institute on the podcast to talk about the ongoing influence this book has had on her as a Black woman living on the borderlands of Chicago’s south side. Key Questions: What are the borderlands and what does it mean to inhabit them? What does Anzaldua’s mean by the term “new mestiza” and how does it challenge, reinforce, or complicate the original notions of mestizaje? Who does this book erase?

Originally published in 1950, Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire directly and dramatically influenced the liberation struggles happening in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This book/essay/poem/manifesto is a blazing collection of thoughts that affirms Black identity and culture, embraces surrealism as revolt, and demands decolonization movements that “decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society.” Césaire exposes the hypocrisy and emptiness of colonialism and capitalism, and the antiblackness and brutality inherent to western notions of “progress,” “reason,” and “civilization.” In this episode, we talk to our long-time comrade Asha Ransby-Sporn to learn more about what Césaire challenges readers to think through and how we might apply its lessons to today’s ongoing struggles against empire.

Have you ever heard of the term “Alinsky-style organizing” and the rules that are involved? For example, “A tactic that drags on too long is a drag” and “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Here in Chicago, Saul Alinksy is often mentioned both for what his analysis is missing, as well as for the helpful basics his tradition offers. Written shortly before his death in 1972, Saul Alinsky was a community organizer in Chicago who wrote about the power of place-based organizing and collective action in the book Rules for Radicals. Since he lacked a radical analysis, this book can be hard to sit with and take seriously. However, we were so grateful to sit down with Maira Khwaja of the Invisible Institute to talk about the highlights, lessons learned, and ways we might incorporate Alinsky’s approach as community organizers committed to abolition. Maybe skip reading this one and instead tune in for highlights, critiques, and salvageable gems!

Ready to learn and get in your feelings? This week, we connected with Stephanie Skora, Associate Executive Director of Brave Space Alliance and author of the Girl, I Guess voter guide. Stephanie shared her love and learnings from S Bear Bergman’s book “Blood, Marriage, Wine & Glitter” a book of personal essays about their queer and trans experiences of family. Join us for this episode to laugh about voting, gag about heteronormativity, and tear up about the importance of storytelling. This is a moving conversation about joy, resilience, memory, love, and softness. As Stephanie reminds us “these are some things we all need more of right now.”

There’s importance in collaboration and experimentation when it comes to organizing. But what does organizing around super radical ideas in very practical and grounded ways in a community you’re not from look like? We chat with Bettina Johnson, co-founder of Liberation Library and member of Chicago Afrosocialists & Socialists of Color of the DSA, about the book Hammer & Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelly. Tune in to our first episode of the season to hear what the Alabama Communist Party can teach us about our social movements today.

Urgent and visionary, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded presents a biting critique of the quietly devastating role the non-profit industrial complex plays in managing dissent. Joy Messinger from Third Wave Fund joins us today to discuss. Hosts: Monica Trinidad & Page May 
Guest: Joy Messinger
 Release Date: February 19, 2019 
Length: 51:00 Key Questions: 
1. What is the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC)?
 2. How does nonprofit status and grants impact the work of community organizations? 3. How did we get here? 
4. What are examples of fundraising strategies that resist the NPIC? 5. How can we build movements outside the non-profit model? Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheLitReview/overview

​In the U.S., it’s becoming increasingly trendier to “go green” and become more environmentally-conscious in our daily lives under capitalism. However, there’s a whole other movement of eco-consciousness and activism that is being heavily criminalized and repressed. In his debut book, Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege, independent journalist Will Potter provides detailed accounts of the targeting of environmental and animal rights activists across the country. Our guest on today’s show is Brad Thomson, a local radical lawyer at the People’s Law Office, which has a history steeped in defending the rights of Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party. Brad focuses on repping people whose civil rights are violated by the police and other state actors, and people criminalized based on their political identity and organizing affiliation. We explore Green is the New Red and how the people that have been involved in the most militant parts of these movements have been attacked and criminalized, how industry and government have characterized these militant actions in order to tarnish the entire movement, and use scare tactics to make it so that anybody who is part of these movements is fearful. Tune in now. Hosts: Monica Trinidad & Page May Guest: Brad Thomson Release Date: February 4, 2019 Length: 51:00 Key Questions: 1. What was the Red Scare? And the new Green Scare? 2. Who is the author and how does his background inform writing this book? 3. Who is the Animal Liberation Front (ALF)? 4. Who was Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC)? 5. Who is the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)? 6. How was the word “terrorism” weaponized in the Green scare? 7. How did corporations and lobbyists create this hysteria for governments and law enforcement to target eco/animal rights activists? 8. What does the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have to do with criminalizing protest? 9. Why should organizers read this book?

What does fascism look like today in the U.S.? Where does the alt-right fit into this? How can it be fought?! We sat down with Chicago-based Native abolitionist organizer, writer and co-struggler Kelly Hayes to discuss Shane Burley's book Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It. Examining the modern fascist movement’s various strains, Shane Burley has written a super accessible primer about what its adherents believe, how they organize, and what future they have in the U.S.

Season Two is sticking with the theme and serving up another episode exploring housing and displacement in Chicago. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 by Arnold Hirsch is considered a premier text on the subject, However, at about 382 dense & jargon-filled pages, it’s a bit intimidating. Here to offer a helpful summary is life-long Chicagoan, writer, and neighborhood organizer, Lynda Lopez.

Who knew that the Chicago neighborhood called Old Town was actually part of Lincoln Park? Who knew it was a site of transformation, displacement, resistance, gentrification, AND urban renewal? We sat down with author and policy analyst Daniel Kay Hertz to talk about his new book, The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago, published by Belt. This is the first book to critically examine the history of Chicago's Old Town neighborhood. It tells the stories of those who first began “upgrading” homes in Old Town, why they moved there, how they used both private activism and leveraged public policy to remake the neighborhood to their own tastes; and how both these newcomers and older residents struggled against competing forces to preserve what they valued in Old Town—and why so many of them felt that they lost.

In this special summer episode, Lit review co-host Monica Trinidad has a phone conversation with dear friend and incarcerated activist, Patrice Lumumba Daniels, about one of his favorite books, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. Banned from prisons in North Carolina and Florida, The New Jim Crow book dives deep into the ways that the U.S. Government has created a new, contemporary system of racial control through the prison system. By targeting Black men through the "War on Drugs" and decimating communities of color, Michelle Alexander argues that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” Tune in to hear how this book has transformed Patrice's life, and many others.