Joel Whitney

New York

Flights: Radicals on the Run (2024) & Finks (2017) Words @nytimes @tnr @npr @wsj @jacobin Curate @bpl_presents Past @guernicamag 2004 - 12 & @aljazeera America

Articles

The Making of the Buru Quartet

4 weeks ago | thebeliever.net | Joel Whitney

Joel Whitney 100 YEARS OF PRAMOEDYAOn October 6, 1973, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was ordered by prison guards to run double-time across Buru Island. The writer had been arrested eight years before, taken into custody in the middle of the night.
The Wire News India, Latest News,News from India, Politics, External Affairs, Science, Economics, Gender and Culture

Jun 16, 2024 | thewire.in | Joel Whitney

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Rigoberta Menchú Paved the Way for an Opening in Guatemala

May 15, 2024 | rsn.org | Joel Whitney

Guatemalan indigenous activist Rigoberta Menchú helped set the tone and forge the climate that convicted the rabidly anti-communist general Efraín Rios Montt and condemned many others guilty of genocide during the country’s brutal civil war. “It is said that our indigenous ancestors, Mayas and Aztecs, made human sacrifices to their gods,” Rigoberta Menchú once quipped.
Rigoberta Menchú Paved the Way for an Opening in Guatemala

May 12, 2024 | jacobin.com | Joel Whitney

“It is said that our indigenous ancestors, Mayas and Aztecs, made human sacrifices to their gods,” Rigoberta Menchú once quipped. “It occurs to me to ask: How many humans have been sacrificed to the gods of capital in the last five hundred years?” The activist’s 1983 memoir, I, Rigoberta Menchú, recounts the shocking story of an American-sponsored counterinsurgency against the majority Maya population.
Flights

Feb 17, 2024 | orbooks.com | Joel Whitney

sub-heading: Radicals on the Run —Junot Diaz —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz —Gerald Horne (You save ) Current Stock: 340 pages Paperback ISBN 9781682194317 E-book ISBN 9781682194324 Publication May 2024 Told through the lives of the American Century’s most talented and stubborn dissidents, Flights is the archetypal hero’s journey of a group of progressives whose struggle for truth, and for freedom from persecution, sent them into exile, both literal and metaphorical. Wanted for a crime she did not...
Wounded Knee's Radical Legacy

Jul 20, 2023 | bostonreview.net | Joel Whitney

In 1973 rookie reporter Kevin McKiernan smuggled himself onto the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in the trunk of a car, hoping to cover the takeover of Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
Angela Davis Exposed the Injustice at the Heart of the Criminal Justice System

Apr 1, 2023 | jacobin.com | Joel Whitney

In December of last year, activist, intellectual, and educator Angela Davis took the podium at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Nyack, New York. The church was not planners’ first choice, but scurrilous red-baiting campaigns led two venues to cancel.
A Novel the CIA Spent a Fortune to Suppress

Mar 28, 2023 | publicbooks.org | Joel Whitney |Geraldo L. Cadava

“Our Latin American literature has always been a committed, a responsible literature,” explained Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1973. The great works of our countries have been written in response to a vital need, a need of the people, and therefore almost all our literature is committed.
Filming the Deep: Margaret Cohen on Underwater Film Technologies

Mar 23, 2023 | publicbooks.org | John Plotz |Joel Whitney

In this conversation, Stanford professor Margaret Cohen and John Plotz discuss The Underwater Eye: How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy. The conversation first appeared in Recall This Book, a Brandeis-based scholarly podcast that is affiliated with both Public Books and the New Books Network: hear the full conversation here. John’s previous conversation partners on Public Books/Recall This Book include Robert Lee, Samuel Delany, and Kim Stanley Robinson.