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In the inaugural episode of BR: A Political and Literary Podcast, Junot Díaz talks to Avni Majithia-Sejpal about critical dystopias, the rice and beans of literature, and a special literary issue on global dystopias. A call for submissions for this literary issue will be out soon.

Critical Dystopias, Global Dystopias: A Conversation with Junot Díaz

Slavery is at the heart of any history of capitalism and human rights. It is the starting point for any conversation about justice today. Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, talks about the notion of racial capitalism, Black Lives Matter, and the question of reparations under and after Trump.

BR: A Political and Literary Podcast

The Souls of White Folk: A Conversation with Walter Johnson

The Souls of White Folk: Talking Reparations, Trump, and Social Justice with Walter Johnson

“In time of crisis, we summon up our strength,” wrote poet Muriel Rukeyser. This collection gathers poems—from the eve of the twenty- first century to the month following Trump’s election—to mark a moment of political rupture, summoning the collective strength found in the languages of resistance and memory, subversion and declamation, struggle and hope. Poetry is a counterforce. We offer these poems to readers as Rukeyser did—“not walls, but human things, human faces.” 

“When freedom is in danger, when you are asked, in one faked way or another, a shabby admonition, to leave your own humanity which includes the humanity of all, the alarm is extra-ordinary, America. Don’t you think so? You must respond, America. You must speak out, you must write.”

— U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, from the Foreword

Poems For Political Disaster

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

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David Rehkopf