Books & Writers · The Creative Process: Novelists, Screenwriters, Playwrights, Poets, Non-fiction Writers & Journalists Talk Writing, Life & Creativity - Speaking Out of Place: CYNTHIA G. FRANKLIN discusses “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea”

Speaking Out of Place: CYNTHIA G. FRANKLIN discusses “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea”

07/10/23 • 30 min

Books & Writers · The Creative Process: Novelists, Screenwriters, Playwrights, Poets, Non-fiction Writers & Journalists Talk Writing, Life & Creativity

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews Cynthia Franklin about her new book, Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea. Taking on pivotal historical moments like the murder of George Floyd and the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter, the on-going struggle of the Palestinian people against the ethno-nationalist Zionist state, and the fight for Indigenous rights in Hawai’i, Franklin asks the question, what requirements to people have to meet in order to fit into the human narrative? And what are the possibilities of creating alternate stories of the human that can accommodate individuals who identify more as members of political collectives, and also narratives that exceed the normative category of the human? This powerful book asks fundamental questions about the relationship between art and activism.

“I posit narrated humanity as a lens through which to study how narratives participate in struggles to conceive human being beyond juridical and narrative humanity.”

Cynthia G. Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i, and coeditor of the journal Biography. She is the author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today and Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies. She has coedited special issues of Biography including “Life in Occupied Palestine” and “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing.” For the past ten years, Cynthia has been on the Organizing Collective of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and she is a founding member and faculty advisor of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH (SFJP@UH). She serves on the Editorial Collective for the newly established initiative EtCH (Essays in the Critical Humanities).

https://english.hawaii.edu/faculty/cynthia-franklin/

www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

“I posit narrated humanity as a lens through which to study how narratives participate in struggles to conceive human being beyond juridical and narrative humanity.”

https://english.hawaii.edu/faculty/cynthia-franklin/

www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

Previous Episode

Highlights - SERGEI GURIEV - Political Economist - Provost of SciencesPo - Co-author of Spin Dictators

"The dictators in the 20th century used military or paramilitary uniforms to project brute force and fear. Today, the situation is different. Successful dictators pretend to be democrats, so they put on civilian suits and travel to Davos to talk to the business elite. They talk to democratic counterparts to pretend that they are like them. And that's exactly the challenge to understanding that these are still non-democratic regimes. We still need to. do something about them because otherwise, we see the encroachments on democracies. And we see also the weakening of our democratic world.

If you think about Viktor Orbán, he started off as a democratic leader, but eventually turned his country into a place where the opposition doesn't have an equal chance to come to power. Another one would be Donald Trump. Trump will very much try to come back and basically, these leaders build a spin dictatorship, want to gain power and stay in power using propaganda and misleading and false information. And so far, American institutions have stood up to those challenges, but who knows what happens next?"

What is a spin dictator? What does tyranny look like in the 21st century? Why is populism on the rise? And how do we reinvent democracy?

Sergei Guriev is the co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Guriev is Provost and a professor of economics and at Sciences Po in Paris. He is a former Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London, and a former Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow in 2004-13.

https://sites.google.com/site/sguriev/
https://spindictators.com/
www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/en/researcher/sergei-guriev.html

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MARK MASLIN - Author of How To Save Our Planet: The Facts - Professor, Earth System Science, University College London

Can we imagine a world where we leave half the earth to the natural environment and use the other half for ourselves? Can we change history and protect the Indigenous, the vulnerable, and the very poorest in society?

Mark Maslin is a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London. Maslin is a leading expert in understanding the anthropocene and how it relates to the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. He has written a number of books on the issue of climate change, his most book is How to Save Our Planet: The Facts.

"EO Wilson suggested that we had to think about the world as a place that we share. And he said: Look, we always seem to need a lot of stuff. So why don't we leave half the earth to the natural environment and allow all the natural processes that we need, and then we use the other half for ourselves. And it's an interesting concept because it says to economists and to the capitalist system: you cannot use all of it. You have to leave half of it to allow the systems to produce clean air, clean water, and allow for biodiversity and ecosystems to restore themselves."

www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/people/academic-staff/mark-maslin
www.penguin.co.uk/books/320155/how-to-save-our-planet-by-maslin-mark/9780241472521

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All images courtesy of Mark Maslin