Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Alexander Menrisky, author of Everyday Ecofascism, shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. He illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Here, Menrisky is joined in conversation with April Anson and Kyle Boggs.

Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature and Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.

April Anson is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Anson writes and teaches at the intersection of the environmental humanities, Indigenous and American studies, and political theory. Anson is cofounder of the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative and coauthor of Against the Ecofascist Creep.

Kyle Boggs is associate professor of rhetoric and community engagement in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Boise State University and author of Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors.

REFERENCES:
Anti-Creep Climate Initiative

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy

Tommy Pico

Jeff Mann

Gloria Anzaldua

Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God

Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence

Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog

Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia

Ketan Joshi on lazy ecofascism

Mark Rifkin’s Settler Common Sense

Emily Martin’s Flexible Bodies

Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menrisky is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

The story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee—and its fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history—is the focus of Rose Miron’s award-winning book Indigenous Archival Activism. Miron’s research and writing are shaped by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations as part of her more-than-a-decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation. Miron is not Mohican and is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the content of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways. Here, Miron is joined in conversation with Jennifer O’Neal.

Rose Miron is vice president of research and education at Newberry Library in Chicago and author of Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, winner of the National Council for Public History Book Award and the Book of Merit Award from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Jennifer O’Neal is assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon.

Praise for the book:

“A necessary volume on the intersection of Indigenous knowledge loss, recovery, and production in the context of settler colonialism.”
—Jacki Thompson Rand, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“a must-read for archivists, researchers, and tribal historians working with/in Indian Country.”
—Shannon Martin, Lynx Clan, Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians; former director, Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways

Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory by Rose Miron is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Society has yet to fully grapple with the administrative chaos that has ensued from the growth of the urban. One such city allows tremendous insight into the process of urbanization in the new millennium: Bengaluru. During the past two decades, Bengaluru’s real estate sector and infrastructure investments have exploded in a massive transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth. The coedited collection of writings Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru explores how people caught up in the whirlwinds of change—construction laborers, street vendors, gig workers—experience, struggle, strive, and speculate to make a livable city for themselves.

Several contributors to this book are gathered here in conversation:

Vinay Gidwani is professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India.

Hemangini Gupta is lecturer in gender and global politics and associate director of GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India and coeditor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader.

Kaveri Medappa is a postdoctoral researcher in human geography at the University of Oxford.

Swathi Shivanand is assistant professor at the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India.

Michael Goldman is associate professor of sociology and global studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization.

Praise for Chronicles of a Global City:

“A nuanced investigation into the precise nature in which Bengaluru (and the global sphere) has embraced what the authors have dubbed 'speculative urbanism', a capital-led paradigm that has monopolised the imagination over public spaces and city-building.”
—Frontline Magazine

Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru is available from University of Minnesota Press.