Today we speak with acclaimed author and activist, and San Francisco legend, Chris Carlsson about his new novel, When Shells Crumble. It begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale—it focuses on how to resist political cynicism and defeatism, and rebuild on planetary wreckage. It is a world-building project filled with wisdom, sadness, and joy. We put this fictional text in conservation with Chris' brilliant non-fiction work, Nowtopia, which offers a radical redefinition of “work” that restores dignity and value to their proper places.

Chris Carlsson, co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the seminal and infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. In 1995 work began on “Shaping San Francisco;” since then the project has morphed into an incomparable archive of San Francisco history at Foundsf.org, award-winning bicycle and walking tours, and almost two decades of Public Talks covering history, politics, ecology, art, and more (see shapingsf.org). Beginning in Spring 2020, Carlsson has hosted Bay Cruises along the San Francisco shoreline.

His latest novel, When Shells Crumble was published by Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn, NY at the end of 2023. At the dawn of the pandemic, he published a detailed historical guidebook of the city, Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020). His full-length nonfiction work Nowtopia (AK Press: 2008), offers a groundbreaking look at class and work while uniquely examining how hard and pleasantly we work when we’re not at our official jobs. He published his first novel, After The Deluge, in 2004, a story of post-economic utopian San Francisco in the year 2157. He has edited six books, including three “Reclaiming San Francisco” collections with the venerable City Lights Books. He redesigned and co-authored an expanded Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay after which he joined the board of the Mission Creek Conservancy. He has given hundreds of public presentations based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, Vanished Waters, and his “Reclaiming San Francisco” history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet.

Today we speak with co-authors Sami Hermez and Sireen Sawalha about their book, My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine. The eminent Palestinian author Hala Alyan calls it “A breathtaking display of literary prowess that tells the story of an entire homeland through the frame of one woman’s life.”

In our conversation Hermez and Sawalha explain the intricate back and forth that took place as the two collaborated to weave together Sireen’s many stories about her extended family on Palestine through many generations. At the heart of the book is the story of her brother Iyad. Through his life, and those he interacts with we hear a story of colonial violence, Palestinian resistance, and the never-ending struggle for liberation across generations of Palestinians.

Sami Hermez, PhD, is the director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (UPenn 2017), which focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence, and My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford 2024), that tells the story of a Palestinian family resisting ongoing Israeli settler colonialism. His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, the future, memory, violence, and critical security in the Arab World.

Sireen Sawalha, born in the small village of Kufr Rai in Jenin, Palestine, comes from a family deeply connected to the region's rich history. She moved to the US in 1990 and completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Rider University. Recognized by Cornell University for her outstanding contributions to education in 2022, Sireen serves as a social studies teacher in New Jersey. Beyond academia, she is a passionate chef and compelling storyteller, sharing her family's experiences under occupation. My Brother, My Land is the story of her family.

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen about their new book, The Black Antifascist Tradition, which uses a vast set of archival materials to show how Black intellectuals and activists regarded anti-Black racism as inseparable from fascism. This is brought out vividly in the ways the law was constructed, labor was extracted, culture oppressed, and lives curtailed.

Struggles for Black liberation are therefore connected across national boundaries, just as fascist and racist laws and practices are shared by oppressive regimes globally. Hope and Mullen show how these cross currents work in examples like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War, and the momentous 1951 document, “We Charge Genocide,” that linked fascism in the US to violations of international humanitarian law. Ultimately, we talk about how peoples’ movements must always acknowledge how racism and fascism are baked into the law, and unite in world-making projects that lead to liberation for all peoples.

Dr. Jeanelle K. Hope is the Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University. She is a native of Oakland, California and a scholar of Black political thought, culture, and social movements. Dr. Hope is the co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. Her research has been published in several academic journals including The American Studies Journal, Amerasia, View, and Black Camera, and her public scholarship has been featured in Voices of River City, Essence, and the African American Policy Forum.

Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is co-author with Jeanelle Hope of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-lynching to Abolition. He is also author of James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press) and We Charge Genocide!: American Fascism and the Rule of Law (forthcoming September Fordham University Press). He is a member of the organizing collective for USACBI (United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).