“Medina Is a Place of Refuge and Creativity” - Maryam Kashani on Muslim Study and Survival in the Bay Area
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Release Date: 03/07/2025
Give Warmth To Gaza with Hala Sabbah of The Sameer Project (Live Audio)
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is the audio from a video we hosted with Hala Sabbah from The Sameer Project on December 3rd, 2025. Hala returned to the program to talk about life in Gaza nearly two months into the so-called "ceasefire." We spoke about the realities on the ground and the needs of people in Gaza right now, what is getting into the strip and what is not, and how the Sameer Project is working within the current conditions in Gaza. We also talk about the need for continued organizing, boycotts, and direct action against the zionist entity. And we spoke about creative ways people can fundraise for Sameer...
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From Phosphate Mining to Forever Chemicals With the Lowcountry Action Committee
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we are joined by organizers from the Lowcountry Action Committee to discuss climate justice in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. We begin with a discussion about climate reparations and the state's unfortunate priorities. We go on to explore the history of phosphate mining and its exploitation of newly emancipated Africans, the ecological destruction it caused, and its legacy of environmental racism. We then turn to hurricane season and the anxiety it provokes in vulnerable working-class and poor Black communities, followed by the toxic legacy of military pollution and...
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Lowcountry Takes Action! with the Lowcountry Action Committee
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, recorded in the summer of 2024, Josh interviewed two organizers from the Lowcountry Action Committee. Lowcountry Action Committee is a Black African grassroots organization dedicated to Black liberation through service, political education, and collective action in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Our conversation centers around their 2024 piece on environmental racism, where they trace the climate catastrophe, threatening to wash away Gullah Geechee homelands back to the phosphate mining industry of the eighteen sixties. We discuss how today's disproportionate...
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The Return of Operation Condor
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this conversation we speak with a labor organizer and people’s historian who covers Latin American movements with connections to Ecuador, Colombia, and Cuba. Folks may know her by the twitter handle . In this conversation she discusses recent struggles and developments in Ecuador. In particular a recent 38 day general strike, and the popular rejection of a recent referendum including measures which would have allowed the US to build military bases in Ecuador and cut public funding for political parties. Our guest contextualizes the current US-backed narco-military regime lead by...
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Prison Death-Worlds, COVID-19, and the Fatal Convenience of Crisis with Dalton Lackey and Teagan Murphy
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we are joined by Dalton Lackey and Teagan Murphy, co-authors of the article “The COVID-19 Murders”: Prison death-worlds and the fatal convenience of crisis. Their work offers a piercing critique of how carceral institutions weaponized the pandemic—not as an unprecedented emergency, but as a tactical opportunity to deepen control, dehumanization, and death. We’ll begin by hearing from Dalton and Teagan about their political motivations, the methodologies they employed, and the intellectual scaffolding behind their analysis. From there, we’ll unpack their challenge to...
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A History of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement (1800-1958) with Francisco A. Santiago Cintrón & Sebastián Castrodad Reverón
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This episode is part of a two part project covering the Puerto Rican Independence Movement from the beginning of the 19th Century until the present. For this conversation our guests are Francisco A. Santiago Cintrón and Sebastián Castrodad Reverón. Francisco A. Santiago Cintrón was born in Guayama, Puerto Rico. He is an activist that currently forms part of Democracia Socialista and works as a labor lawyer. He is also the founder of the journal “Critica: Cuaderno de Discusión Política” Sebastián Castrodad Reverón, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is an organizer, documentarian,...
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“Remember to Blot Out the Memory” - The Biblical Recipe for Endless Genocide with Reverend Darren
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode we interview Reverend Darren who is a minister in the Presbyterian Church USA in Wisconsin. This conversation started as a text and google doc exchange around the story of Amalek within the Old Testament of the Christian Bible and the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible. We talk about how we should understand the relationship between these biblical stories and documented history, their relationship to the Gaza genocide, and how we might fit our analyses of these narratives into the relationship between US imperialism and zionism. Along the way, Darren engages with questions of...
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2 Years of Genocide, 2 Years of Resistance (Live-stream Audio) with Abdaljawad Omar & Lara Sheehi
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Abdaljawad Omar and Lara Sheehi joined us on the 2nd anniversary of the beginning of Tufan Al-Aqsa! From the youtube (which I encourage people to watch): We will remember the morning of October 7th 2023. In the two years since then there has been a genocidal counterinsurgency war waged against the whole Palestinian population, most acutely through the apocalyptic decimation of the Gaza Strip. There has also been constant resistance in many forms. How do we consider the present moment, the possibilities (once again) of "ceasefire," the attempts to end the "Palestinian Question," the actuality...
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The “New” US Assassination Program & the Hybrid War on Venezuela with Joe Emersberger
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Recently the US Military has been bombing boats in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela. This marks a major escalation, and a new development in the US Empire’s hybrid war on Venezuela that has been waged over the last 20 years. In this episode we speak with Joe Emersberger who along with Justin Podur authored the book for Monthly Review Press. "" by Joe Emersberger and Richard Harris on We talk about the origins of this tactic of aerial assassinations, its deployment in international waters, and whether we could see the US expand its assassination program to target government...
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European Class Struggle Starts at the Bottom of the Sea with Iker Suárez
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we speak with Iker Suárez, who authored a searing piece in the Monthly Review titled "." In it, he challenges the dominant humanitarian framing of migrant deaths at sea, arguing that it isn’t a moral crisis but a structural necessity of late imperialism. What unfolds on Europe’s shores, he contends, is but a violent expression of global capital’s unraveling. Further, diving into the works of scholars like Ali Kadri and Samir Amin, we explore how unresolved agrarian contradictions in the Global South, the accumulation of waste, and the labor-capital contradiction...
info_outlineThis is the first part of a two part conversation with Maryam Kashani on her book Medina By The Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival
It’s a cool book that weaves Maryam’s scholarly ethnographic work with her talents as a filmmaker and a DJ to examine and illuminate various strains of Islam in the San Francisco Bay Area from the Black Power Movement to the so-called war on terror and the rise of the surveillance state. She dubs her approach an “ethnocinematic.” We discuss legacies of anti-imperialist Islam on Turtle Island as well as more assimilative ways of being. We’ll dig into this more in part 2, but we wanted to make sure to get this part out during Ramadan.
Kashani is an associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition. We’ll include a lengthier bio in the show description.
Believers Bail Out has a fundraiser to bail out Muslims during Ramadan which we will link in the show description. We really encourage folks to kick in what they can to support that initiative.
The other thing I wanted to make sure to mention is we do talk a little bit about Imam Jamil Al-Amin in this episode. I’m including a couple of links to projects and campaigns related to Imam Jamil Al-Amin in the show description. According to Students for Imam Jamil he has received a medical transfer thanks to the support and calls of many folks. But there are other ways people can continue to support Imam Jamil Al-Amin (see below).
And lastly, we have a Samir Amin Accumulation on a World Scale Study Group for patrons only. It will start Wednesday the 12th of March and run through June. I’ll include a link with more details in the show description, but space is limited on that so if you want to reserve a spot make sure to sign up today at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism which is also the best place to support our work on this podcast.
Links:
Purchase Medina By The Bay through Massive Bookshop, the bookstore that bails people out of jail.
For Maryam's essay on Hajja Dhameera Ahmad check out the book Black Power Afterlives
For more on Imam Jamil Al Amin: https://www.
Samir Amin Accumulation on a World Scale Study Group (7:30 PM Eastern Time US on Wednesdays)
Believers Bail Out use Zakat to bail Muslims out of jail or immigrant detention
Full bio:
Maryam Kashani works from a deep commitment to the aesthetic and political possibilities of experimental filmmaking, music, and the essay form, whether as 16mm films and videos, text/sound/image installations and live performance, DJing, or written monograph. Her work explores the relationships between physical landscapes and the sociopolitical, material, and spiritual histories and forces that emerge with and against them and is concerned with narration and description, archive, and knowledge production with a particular focus on collective study and struggle in and against colonial racial capitalism across local and global geographies. She recently published Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke University Press, 2023), which is an ethnocinematic examination of how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Her films and video installations (http://www.maryamkashani.com/) have been shown at film festivals, universities, and museums internationally, including the Sharjah Biennial, MoMA, Hammer Museum, Chelsea Museum, and the Pacific Film Archive.
Kashani is an associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition.