“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
"Like We're at War with a Foreign Nation" - How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Anti-Left Repression with Tariq Khan
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode we interview Tariq Khan on his book The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression. We’ll be releasing this conversation as a two part episode on this excellent book which studies how anticommunism within the US is deeply intertwined with settler colonialism, anti-indigenous thought, and genocidal violence. This helps us to reframe our often twentieth century centric view of anti-left repression in the US. Khan’s work on the 19th century in particular also helps us to see the ways things like race science, eugenics, and...
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Against Western/Imperial Feminisms with Khadija Haynes
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we speak with Khadijah Haynes about her recent piece, "A Fetus on the Dirt Road” which offers a sharp critique of Western feminism's complicity in imperialism and its historical roots in racial violence. Haynes argues that Western feminism often obscures the struggles of both Black women and men, relying on colonial and anti-Black logics that fail to address the broader context of sexualized, gendered, and racialized abuses of all Black African people. We discuss other historical and contemporary critiques of feminism, argue that feminism does not have a...
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Counterinsurgency Urbanism with Ted Rutland
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, recorded mid-2024, we speak with Ted Rutland about the evolution of policing from the mid-20th century's professional model to the counterinsurgency urbanism that emerged in the 1970s and 80s in Canada. Rutland discusses how community policing, initially intended to bring police closer to communities through multicultural training and social services, became a strategy to win over parts of the community while waging a larger war against the rest. We delve into some of the historical shifts in policing largely as a response to radical movements and urban...
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“What Does It Mean to Be at the Table?” - Maryam Kashani on Muslim Study and Survival
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is the conclusion of our two part conversation with Maryam Kashani on her book Among other things, in this conversation we talk about the impact and meaning of 1492 to the Muslim world. We discuss Kashani’s concept of the Blues Adhan by way of Clyde Woods. We discuss the experiences of women muslims, and women scholars in Kashani’s book. We talk about the two jihads and other Muslim practices such as zakat and the contradictions between Islamic thought and practice and those demanded by the capitalist and carceral state. It’s a rich discussion that I hope folks find as interesting...
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“The Dark” - D. Óg on the Writings of Irish Revolutionary Brendan Hughes
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode we interview D. Óg, an Irish Republican and Irish language activist who works with Iskra Books, and their Irish language imprint Bradán Feasa. In this discussion we talk about the Iskra Books publication . Hughes, was a former Irish Republican Army volunteer, political prisoner, and Hunger Striker. And while he is a very well known figure within Irish Republican circles and among those who have studied the provisional IRA, some folks may also have become introduced to him through the book and the Fx/Hulu series Say Nothing. In this episode I talk to D a bit about...
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“Medina Is a Place of Refuge and Creativity” - Maryam Kashani on Muslim Study and Survival in the Bay Area
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This 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...
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The Condition of Palestine as the Condition of the World with Dylan Saba
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode recorded mid-2024, Josh spoke with Dylan Saba about some of his essays beginning with one titled "A Struggle to Destroy the World,” where he argued that the condition of Palestine is the condition of the modern world. We discuss the role of the Iron Dome as an offensive system, its historical context, and its implications for the colonial-imperialist power imbalance in the region. Saba also provides an overview of the strategic use of aid as a weapon to maintain control, division, and weaken Palestinian resistance. We also touch on how the Israeli military's...
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The Tufan of Return: Ceasefire & the Disentanglement of Catastrophe & Defeat with Abdaljawad Omar
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is a light edit of a we hosted with Abdaljawad Omar on our YouTube channel. The conversation was so timely and incisive that we wanted to ensure there was also a version on our audio podcast feed. In this discussion we cover the Tufan of Return, talk about the ceasefire, the prisoner exchanges, the decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure, and the concept of Nakba within Palestine, getting into the issues that Abdaljawad has with the divergent meanings of the word, which get conflated in many analyses of 1948 and into the present. There are on our YT channel, about different topics...
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Zionism as the Negation of Jewish Indigeneity: Darryl Li on Racialization, Colonialism, and Resistance in Palestine
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we speak with Darryl Li about some of his essays. We begin by discussing his work and experiences in Palestine. His transformation from an NGO worker in the early 2000s to a scholar and political activist. Li explores the interpolation of Jewishness into a racial category globally. He also explores the Law of Return, which allows any Jew in the world to not only settle in Israel but also to enjoy superior rights to the land than Palestinians. The conversation covers the evolution of Palestinian armed resistance, particularly in Gaza, and the shift in Israeli strategies from...
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“Measuring Salvation in Chains and Corpses” - Andrew Krinks on the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is the conclusion of our two part interview with Andrew Krinks on his recently published book . Today we explore the religious functions police play for Christian societies, in particular the US, and their relationship to theological concepts of redemption and salvation. We also talk about religious discipline, labor discipline and regimes of prison labor, which is obviously topical with renewed discussions of incarcerated fire fighters with the recent . Krinks also explains why the dehumanization of prisons should not be understood as a violation of their mandate, but a fundamental...
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.