In this online forum, activist-authors explored how storytelling can be a powerful tool for resistance to injustice and Empire.
While good reporting helps us to be aware of, and understand current events, social change is a long-term endeavour that requires imagination, vision, and deconstruction of the status quo. Hence, storytelling — through novels, poems, biography, art, podcasts and more — can be vital.
This video is an abridged version of the forum.
Speakers:
Tamara Pearson is an Australian-Mexican long-time journalist, editor, activist and literary fiction author. Her feature and investigative journalism focuses on global inequality and the Global South, the climate, migration, media criticism, movements and the US’s unhealthy relationship with Latin America. Her latest novel is The Eyes of the Earth, and she writes the Global South newsletter, Excluded Headlines.
Behrouz Boochani is an award-winning Kurdish writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. His memoir No Friend But the Mountains was written during his seven years of incarceration by the Australian government in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island prison.
Bill Fletcher Jr has been active in the labor movement, community struggles and electoral campaigns. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and he is the author of two fiction novels, co-author of books about Black workers and about the crisis in organized labor, and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” He is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the web.
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer, a professor at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, and author of various fiction and non-fiction books, including works about the US empire and Venezuela, the US in Rwanda and DR Congo, and Haiti. As a journalist he has reported from around the world, including India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, the DRC, Colombia, Mexico and more.
Michael Fox is a freelance reporter and video journalist based in Latin America. He is the former editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas and the author of two books on Latin America, the producer of various documentaries, and his two recent podcast series integrate story telling with history and analysis.