History of six major social reform movements in the United States from the early 19th to mid 20th centuries – abolitionism, populism, progressivism, the so-called “first wave” of the women’s movement, the labour movement, and the socialist and communist movements. The focus is how the white-dominated core of each related to racism, and how Black …
Month: August 2020
Just finished the second of two interviews for the week. Yesterday, I spoke with France and Chris of Primary Colours / Couleurs primaires about their work to challenge racism and colonialism in Canada’s arts system. Today, it was to Tamara of Canadian Voice of Women for Peace and Brent of Peace Brigades International – Canada on the campaign against …
YA contemporary at heart, though it dabbles a bit in fantasy, mystery, and fairy tale. A tiny island off the east coast of a continent that is implied but not stated to be North America, an island known only for a rare bird that nests there in the summer and that draws a small but …
Shahrzad Mojab is an activist and an academic at the University of Toronto. She was recently involved in the publication of a book called Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow, a translation of a powerful poem by Iranian poet Saeed Yousef that remembers the massacre of political prisoners in Iran in the 1980s. Scott Neigh interviews Mojab …
Sci-fi, I guess, of the 15-minutes-into-the-future variety. A group of oddball friends and the new kid in school, a girl who was a minor celebrity because her mother left her right after she was born to be part of the crew of the first ever space mission to leave the solar system – a long, …
Thank-you to Christine and Quentin for the interview just now about the Unions Are Essential campaign from SEIU Local 2 that is supporting workers during COVID, and about a recent successful organizing drive. Listen for it on Talking Radical Radio in a few weeks!
This is a rebroadcast of an episode of Talking Radical Radio that was originally broadcast in March 2020. Sharon Fortney is the Curator of Indigenous Collections and Engagement at the Museum of Vancouver. Scott Neigh interviews her about the complicated colonial history of museums and about the Acts of Resistance exhibit. It features the massive banners designed by Indigenous artists …
By a prominent US scholar of slavery. A mixture of history, memoir, and essay. Organized around an extended stay in Ghana and an exploration of the key sites of the slave trade there. An intense, often painful meditation on loss, forgetting, remembering, legacies of relentless violence, and the impossibility of return. Focused to a significant …
Middle-grade. Contemporary. The book opens with the 12 year-old Sunny St. James about to enter surgery for a long-awaited heart transplant. With a penchant for gallows humour, rash decisions, and secret poetry, Sunny is committed to seizing the opportunity presented by her new heart – in the face of painful friend-drama, the sudden return of …
A collection of short stories by one of the current giants of speculative fiction. A pretty wide range of lengths, tones, and kinds of stories. I think novel length work actually shows off her brilliance more effectively, but I definitely enjoyed this. One good measure of that is the fact that even with short story …