​​​Release Date: Feb 28, 2021
Length: 32:49
Production: Monica Trinidad
​Transcript 
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Episode 57: Season 3 Debrief
with Page May and Monica Trinidad 

Season 3 is a wrap! In 8 episodes, Monica and Page went deep on topics including decolonization and land justice, civil rights history, and organizing fundamentals. And in the midst of the pandemic, uprisings, and elections, they did their best to highlight the incredible resistance work happening in Chicago in their short but hearty introductions!
 
There’s no special guest in this season finale–just your favorite co-hosts chopping it up, sharing their highlights and lingering questions. There's also some updates about what to expect for Season 4 and how you can help make it the best season of The Lit Review yet.

​In the meantime, catch up on past episodes and keep reading!
 
Release Date: December 20, 2020
Length: 1:24:58
Production: B. Russelburg
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Episode 56: From the Ground Up
with Juliana Pino

To close out the season, Monica and Page talk with Juliana Pino Alcaraz, Policy Director at the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, about From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement by Luke Cole & Sheila Foster.

This short but dense book focuses on the history of the Environmental Justice movement leading up to the signing of the 1994 Executive Order on Environmental Justice by President Clinton, and then outlines several examples of community efforts to resist environmental racism in the 1990s. Juliana breaks down  frameworks, structures, tactics, and campaign strategies, in addition to addressing what's missing. This is a longer episode because we just couldn’t cut any of this brilliance. Grab a notebook and get settled in!
  
Key Questions: When did the Environmental Justice movement begin? What is environmental racism? How are policing and prisons connected to environmental justice? What are some core strategies and practices that folks could take to engage in environmental justice work in their communities? 
 
Release Date: December 13, 2020
Length: 1:09:49
​Production: B. Russelburg
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Episode 55: Groundwork
with Christian Snow

​Despite some truly 2020-style audio recording issues, our second to last episode of the season is here! Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, and Charles Payne, unearths the buried stories of the people, places, and struggles that laid the foundation for the Civil Rights movement. 

Monica and Page talk with Christian Snow of Assata’s Daughters and the People’s Law Office, who shares her love and key takeaways from the book. 

Key Questions: What is the Black Radical Tradition? What are the limitations of the mainstream history we are taught about the Civil Rights movement? What is left out and how does that historical interpretation interfere with our current movement practices? What is “ground” or “spade” work and how has it been a part of Black freedom struggles?
 
Release Date: November 28, 2020
Length: 53:28
Production: B. Russelburg
​Transcript coming soon
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Episode 54: Freedom Farmers
​with Vivi Moreno 

Fannie Lou Hamer is increasingly recognized for her leadership with the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, but did you know about the 600-acre Freedom Farm Cooperative she started? This is one of many examples of Black farmers organizing for power and self-determination highlighted in Monica White’s Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. 

Monica and Page talk with Vivi Moreno, food justice organizer and urban farmer with Catatumbo Cooperative Farm and part of the Farmers for Chicago program hosted by Urban Growers Collective. ​Vivi helps us understand the long history of agricultural resistance and applies it to the ongoing struggles we still face today for healthy, sustainable, and self-determining communities.

Key Questions: What role and contributions did Black farmers have to the Black freedom movement? What does farming have to do with community organizing? And abolitionist movements specifically? What is food sovereignty? What does the struggle for food and land justice look like right now? ​
 
Blue graphic with photo of guest and book

​Release Date: November 23, 2020
Length: 47:35
Production: B. Russelburg
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Episode 53: Borderlands
with Trina Reynolds-Tyler

​This was a hard book to talk about, but we’re so glad that we did. The late Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is beloved to many and considered a fundamental text in Chicana and Latinx studies. With gorgeous prose, she richly captures the unique experiences of those who inhabit the borderlands; of place, gender, class, and identity. Anzaldúa's book offers a poetic description of what it’s like to be caught between worlds. At the same time, this work is rightly called-out for those that it erases: Black, Indigenous, and trans people —all also existing and resisting in the borderlands.
 
Monica and Page talk with Trina Reynolds-Tyler of the Invisible Institute about the ongoing influence this book has had on her as a Black woman living on the borderlands of Chicago’s south side. 

Key Questions: What are the borderlands and what does it mean to inhabit them? What does Anzaldua mean by the term “new mestiza” and how does it challenge, reinforce, or complicate the original notions of mestizaje? Who does this book erase? 
 
Release Date: November 16, 2020
Length: 43:42
Production: B. Russelburg
Transcript
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Episode 52: Discourse on Colonialism
with Asha Ransby-Sporn

Originally published in 1950, Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire directly and dramatically influenced the liberation struggles happening in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. A blazing collection of thoughts that affirms Black identity and culture, embraces surrealism as revolt, and demands decolonization movements that “decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society.”

​Monica and Page talk with their long-time comrade Asha Ransby-Sporn ​of the Black Abolitionist Network (BAN) and Dissenters. to learn more about what Césaire challenges readers to think through and how we might apply its lessons to today’s ongoing struggles against empire.

Key Questions: Who are the watchdogs of colonialism? How does surrealism challenge colonialism? How do we talk about slavery and colonialism together? How can we relate this analysis to the Black Lives Matter movement, and our efforts to defund the police? ​​​
 
Release Date: November 9, 2020
Length: 48:42
Production: B. Russelburg
​Transcript
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Episode 51: Rules for Radicals
​with Maira Khwaja

Have you ever heard of the term “Alinsky-style organizing” and the rules that are involved? For example, “A tactic that drags on too long is a drag” and “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Here in Chicago, Saul Alinsky is often mentioned both for what his analysis is missing, as well as for the helpful basics his tradition offers.

Monica and Page talk with Maira Khwaja of the Invisible Institute about Rules for Radicals: A Pragramtic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul Alinsky. Tune in for highlights, lessons learned, and ways we might incorporate Alinsky’s approach as community organizers committed to abolition.

Key Questions: What are Alinsky’s tactics & rules for organizing? What is place-based organizing? What is political realism? What is the difference between mass organizing and mass movement building?
 
Release Date: November 2, 2020
Length: 43:27
Production: B. Russelburg
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Episode 50: Blood, Marriage, Wine, and Glitter
​with Stephanie Skora

Ready to learn and get in your feelings? In this episode, Monica and Page connect with Stephanie Skora, Associate Executive Director of Brave Space Alliance and author of the Girl, I Guess Voter Guide.

Stephanie shares her love and learnings from S. Bear Bergman’s Blood, Marriage, Wine & Glitter, a book of personal essays about their queer and trans experiences of family. This is a moving conversation about joy, resilience, memory, love, and softness, sprinkled with some timely conversation about the complexities of voting.

Key Questions: What are the Jewish and trans traditions of storytelling as ritual and resistance? What are necropolitics? How do queer and trans experiences of family connect to radical organizing? How do we build across generations, and difference, and time? Why vote?​
 
​Release Date: October 26, 2020
Length: 53:11
Production: B. Russelburg
Transcript
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Episode 49: Hammer and Hoe
​with Bettina Johnson

There’s importance in collaboration and experimentation when it comes to organizing. But what does that work look like in a community you’re not from?

​Monica and Page chat with Bettina Johnson, co-founder of Liberation Library and member of Chicago Afrosocialists & Socialists of Color of the DSA, about Hammer & Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelly. 

​Key Questions: Why did the Communist Party go to the South? What did the organizing strategy look like on-the-ground for the Communists? What kind of repression did Alabama Communists face? What did the roles of young people and women look like in the CP? What can newly radicalized folks learn from this book?​