Pretty Heady Stuff

Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay is clinical faculty at the McGill Department of Family Medicine, focusing on supporting rural and low-resource practice. Mukhopadhyay organises around issues related to extractivism, migrant rights, policing, public services and decolonizing global health within local and international networks and collectives. Alexis Shotwell is a Professor in Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her academic work addresses impurity, environmental justice, racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and political transformation. She is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding from 2011, and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times from 2016. We discuss Baj’s new book from Fernwood Publishing, Country of Poxes: Three Germs and the Taking of Territory. In the book, we get an innovative technique for telling the history of colonialism and its effects on past and present capacities for collective survival, threatened as it has always been by microscopic entities that enter our bodies and undermine a misplaced and sinister pretence to mastery. In this conversation we talk about the question of culpability. Baj’s book prompts Alexis to think about agency and how illness is distributed. In her reading, its argument stresses how social actors have made consequential choices in the past, and how, as Baj writes in the book, “reflecting on these experiences in the past” can enable “those of us who believe in a more just, a more healed… future” to “contribute in some way to cobbling together a truer liberation.” You won’t just learn a lot by reading Country of Poxes—a text that focuses on the colonial continua of smallpox, tuberculosis, and syphilis—you’ll also learn, I think, to think differently about the tendency to accept suffering and death. The book historicizes contemporary diagnostic tools, dominant and subordinate ideologies of care in health, as well as the struggle for radical alternatives to the “fragile” health care systems we currently have. Mukhopadhyay’s articles from Briarpatch and Upping the Anti: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/the-labour-of-care https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/19-care-as-colonialism Country of Poxes: https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/country-of-poxes

Fab Filippo is an actor, screenwriter, and playwright. Most recently, he co-created, wrote, and directed the critically acclaimed comedy-drama “Sort Of,” for CBC and HBO Max. A winner of a slew of awards, Sort Of (https://gem.cbc.ca/media/sort-of/) is the main focus here, but Fab has also worked on a huge array of shows and films over the years, from his work writing and directing Save Me, to co-writing the true crime indie film Perfect Sisters. Gray Powell has worked all over Canada with various theatre companies, but has spent the most time acting at The Shaw Festival where he is a Festival star. His most recent film and television credits include “Hudson & Rex,” “Designated Survivor,” “Murdoch Mysteries,” and the Netflix film ARQ. My conversation with Fab and Gray grew out of an article that I just wrote for CBC that focuses on this fantastic show Sort Of, a series focused on the character of Sabi, played so captivatingly by Bilal Baig, who is also the show’s co-creator, executive producer and writer. My article talks about my experience as the father of a transgender kid in the 21st century, and about how the show challenges us as caregivers to consider the emotional labour that kids, and especially gender nonconforming kids, often have to do to support their parents. The show has caused me to think about some of my own ideas around identity. It is remarkable for the ways it does this through subtle storytelling, rather than by being didactic or “preachy.” And this is one of the things that we talk about a lot in this conversation: how does a show that’s built, in part, out the parameters of trying to find arts funding in Canada create a tone that is “gentle” and “subtle,” without losing its edge or abandoning its radical commitment to honesty, gender and racial inclusion, intersectionality, and queer love? Fab senses that one defining feature of the new Canadian flourishing of progressive television might be an interest in “cross-sectionality.” At a couple of points here Fab talks about how he’s “thrilled by existence of this interview with Gray” because of the original genesis of Sort Of: to make a show about how each of us is going through transitions, and about how “not all transitions are alike.” The three of us talk about what it means to try to constantly learn and be humble as dads, to negotiate “ego” and be adaptable. Fab’s point is well-taken here: he reminds us that “you cannot engineer your child.” Just like, as an artist, they have to “let go of… perfectionism,” being a parent means relinquishing control of your kids and giving them “room to be new.” The result, with Sort Of, is a show where every character has a distinct voice and three dimensions, the humour feels organic, and yet the overall tone feels cohesive. A rare feat. And one accomplished, they say, but creating a creative environment that respects difference and that seeks difference.

Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University, Toronto. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, In Praise of Copying and The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice, which was just recently released from Duke University Press. I was really excited to speak with him about The Politics of Vibration because it’s a terrific, dense, complex book. There are so many ways to approach thinking about the beauty, power and moving qualities of music and vibration. Maybe because glory has connotations of the divine, we’ll start there. Boon doesn’t avoid the spiritual aspects of music in his book. He reinforces this sense of the ineffable in sound and vibration. But what does this mean? He relates it to the way that, when he has conversations about what music is with colleagues and friends, they’ll sometimes claim that he isn’t “playing fair.” Meaning that he catches them off-guard with ontological questions about something that they experience on an emotional level, at the level of uncomplicated pleasure. They’re aware that they don’t exactly have a language for what they’re experiencing, but aren’t ready to concede that this means what they’re experiencing is something spiritual, and maybe—I can only speculate here—because spirituality feels too immaterial to fit in our obsessively material and materialistic age. In the same way, though, that Boon was exploring the conflicts between the material and supernatural or spiritual in psychedelic drug use with The Road of Excess, in The Politics of Vibration he’s invested in working against what he calls a “desacralized music aesthetics” and toward a framework that includes the rather enticing notion that music is made when we make “decisions about how to play with waves,” how to “craft” spaces of feeling through waveforms. If we adopt this sort of expansive framework, Marcus is saying that we move rather quickly into a world where music is actually asking “ontological questions” of us. And he explains how non-European cultures of music have an intuition and a technical expertise in this: that the pursuit of “target states” through music is not a foreign concept in many cultures. The idea of tapping into the “vibration of the land” in many Indigenous musical pathways is a vital practice, for example, in a settler colonial context where finding meaning and belonging in spite of alienation and disconnection is an urgent matter. Beyond that, it’s clear to Boon that many people integrate music in their lives as a tool to resist what he terms the dominant “time regime” of neoliberal global capitalism, in which we’re in many ways compelled to sacrifice the tempo, rhythm and temporality of our lives to a regime that imposes profit-driven structures from outside. So the way Boon approaches the question of music is both philosophical and political, but it’s also very personal. He talks about how music “holds you up,” it allows you to find courage in hard times, bathes you in a kind of lightness and supportiveness. Music can be restorative for us as individuals, and motivating for us in collectives. Some music “impinges” on you, he points out. And some scenes of music (in particular, house music, hip hop, punk, some experimental music) impinges on us a little bit more powerfully because the people embedded in it feel it in a less fearful way, in a way that more openly embraces all the ways that sound can shape us, alter our consciousness and transport us somewhere different. He gravitates to those scenes where folks are less fearful of the embodied effects of music and the “possibilities of sound.”

Ben Tarnoff is the author of A Counterfeiter’s Paradise and The Bohemians. He’s the co-founder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in a lot of different places, mostly left publications like The Guardian and Jacobin. His most recent piece of writing, and the focus of this conversation, is a book called Internet for the People. It’s an incredibly engaging study of how the modern internet came to be, why it's fundamentally broken, and what steps we can take to make it less broken. I asked Ben about the approach he took to writing Internet for the People because I was really impressed with how he was able to weave metaphors in with accessible language to give folks a much deeper understanding of “the stack,” as it’s called: or the massively complex architecture of the modern internet. One of my favourite lines from the book comes from his description of how the internet is “too sprawling to squeeze into a single frame,” and “too big to see without a metaphor.” That just makes intuitive sense, but it also becomes a sort of method for Tarnoff, as he works to explain the interlocking systems that create the conditions for living life today in a way that is increasingly saturated by internet technologies. His argument in the book is both easy to grasp and hard to pin down: when it comes to internet access, he makes it clear that increasing access by wresting the power away from large telecom companies that pioneered the privatization of the net isn’t just important in terms of protecting consumers from being gouged by ISPs, it is actually—in the era of more and more virtual activity—a basic condition of democratic decision-making and participation. One of the threats that your average internet user might be able to identify, when it comes to the links between online life and a healthy democracy, is the problem of “filter bubbles.” This is another area where Ben’s robust ability to synthesize a lot of research on the subject gets combined with his capacity to break things down: he says that this idea of “filter bubbles” basically brainwashing people is not just unfair, it’s inaccurate. We talk about some of the biggest companies in tech: touching on Zuckerberg’s empire, the power of Amazon and Uber, and how these companies are all sitting on a proprietary accumulation of data that makes them some of the most supremely valued corporations in history. What does it mean, Tarnoff asks, that data itself has become this valuable? The book answers that question in easy-to-parse ways, but the implications are still only now being worked through: I think it’s particularly important to think about his claim that, in fact, companies like Uber are allowed to lose money in part because of the aura around them as a “novel corporate form,” and because of the data they collect and control. At the end of the conversation Ben describes some of the places that he derives hope from, and you can read more about that by looking at his long piece at Logic magazine titled “The Making of a Tech Worker” movement (https://logicmag.io/the-making-of-the-tech-worker-movement/full-text/). There is a redefinition of labour in tech coming—in an industry that doesn’t like to call what happens in it work, and which nonetheless relies on the skills and time and commitment of a vast cross-section of people from different classes and sectors. There is, he suggests, also a radical break on its way: a breaking away from the sort of bourgeois identification that might be a barrier to organizing across classes in the tech sector. And this is happening at the same time that a broader “techlash” is figuring the founders of these companies—long deified as genuines—as effectively the antagonists in a struggle for a more free, fair and democratized access to the power of technology in the present moment.

Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. His research interests focus on the politics of colonialism and structural forms of violence founded and exacerbated by and through imperialism. Alex Khasnabish is a writer, researcher and teacher committed to collective liberation who also lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). He’s a professor in sociology and anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University. His research focuses on the radical imagination, social justice and social movements. In our conversation we look at some of the ideas from their forthcoming book from Fernwood Press, Frequently Asked White Questions. The book comes out of both frustration and inspiration. They were frustrated by the insufficiency of existing efforts at anti-racist education, given especially the current state of affairs in the world, with a resurgent far-right populism winning political ground, but they were also inspired to create space for people to pose questions that, especially in the case of white folks like myself, we might feel somewhat anxious about asking, because there are certain expectations within existing social justice spaces. Their book was the outgrowth of a YouTube show where they saw specific patterns emerge from the questions that were being asked. It's clear that there were specific things on people's minds, and so they wrote the book in order to catalog and constructively engage with those patterns, those questions, those concerns that keep people from being able to even imagine multiracial society, and solidarity within it. Instead of trying to play expert, they want to try to move past “moralistic denunciation” and lecturing and toward a model of “generosity” and “genuineness.” As Ajay puts it, “basic respect” has become more difficult at a time of conflict and polarization. This is, for him, where the Left has collectively sort of “missed the boat;” it has “underestimated right populism and failed to adequately address the political moment.” In the face of these failures, they want to experiment with more “evocative methods” on what needs to be done. The crucial question, from their perspective, is who is going to come up with a narrative that is “savvy and engaging enough to capture public attention” and gain traction in an era of persistent white supremacy and a potent attachment to past and present frameworks for maintaining hierarchy? These are not ideas that are easy to drive home. Arguing for an anti-capitalist politics is not necessarily going to resonate with all people or publics. But they still bring it into the conversation in ways that are convincing, and bring it, more specifically into the conversation about ecological justice movements and anti-racism. One of the biggest takeaways here is the idea that where we start out ontologically has a crucial effect on where we end up. In Ajay’s words it's ontology rather than epistemology that is at stake here. Rather than just a matter of knowledge, it's about the “nuts and bolts that go into cultivating whole systems of knowledge and approaches to ethics.”

Monty Scott is a brilliant stand-up comedian from Scarborough, Ontario. His album The Abyss Stares Back was nominated for a Juno Award in 2019. And while it didn’t win Comedy Album of the Year, it still represents a real victory: Scott recorded it in part as a response to a near-death experience. We talk in this conversation about bouncing back, the lives and livelihoods of comedians in Canada, speak to the politics of comedy today, and try to imagine ways of thinking about comedy as an art. There are practical reasons for trying to figure out a way to define comedy in these terms. As I discussed in my article for The Breach (https://breachmedia.ca/comedy-and-solidarity-in-canada/), getting comedy recognized this way would open up funding opportunities for a creative community that was hit very hard by the temporary and permanent closure of many venues during the pandemic. But it’s also a theoretical question: there are entrenched assumptions about what art is and what it should do. Changing the definition is slow, difficult work. And yet, Scott suggests, there is a path to comedy getting perceived as a legitimate art. He emphasizes, first of all, that it’s already an obviously relevant art form. It is a live conversation. It’s popular. People need it. He says it may even be “foundational to our existence.” Nonetheless, getting comedy recognized as an art is still a major objective of the Canadian Association of Stand-up Comedians, the organization for which Monty currently acts as president. A shift is already happening on the provincial level, but it remains a struggle. His gut tells him that the important thing is to listen to the people, to take them seriously, and trust that the work comedians can accomplish when they move out of a purely individualistic space and into solidarity with one another can actually achieve something transformative. Another area where he says we gain a lot of clarity from listening to the people is on the question of shifting levels of tolerance, and the politics of comedy. While he admits that his own comedy is, in many ways, grounded in being truly silly, he gets that there is a changing political climate around comedy. Still valuing the power of humour to go to uncomfortable places, while also understanding that there is a fine line between challenging norms and seeking shock for its own sake, is a tricky thing. But I appreciated his point that shock value has little real value, and that there’s an important contradiction between people casually laughing at stereotypes and then getting offended by the willingness to explicitly identify racism. He admits that, in Canadian comedy, being a person of colour means facing a real struggle to avoid being stereotyped. In the fact of that push to simplify one’s perspective and make one’s comedy digestible, he points out that there is a real fusion in Canadian society and that we need a shift in perspective on immigration, on inclusion, and to radically embrace diversity. This also means taking seriously what sorts of racially stratified impacts the pandemic has had in Canada, and really worldwide, as well. This is bigger than comedy, but it also implicates humour in a number of different ways.

Sandra Battaglini is an actor, stand-up comedian and writer. She is also the founder of the Canadian Association of Stand-Up Comedians, an organization that represents comics in Canada and lobbies for them to be recognized as the brilliant, culturally significant artists that they are. I just wrote an article for The Breach that features Sandra, among other comedians, and looks at some of her efforts to push for fair pay, government recognition from the Canada Council, and organized resistance against the pull of American media imperialism. Her left political perspectives are in many ways written in CASC’s DNA. She talks here about how CASC was imagined as a kind of “rights movement” focused on stressing the right to be “included” among other communicative arts that we consider culturally more ennobling or important. She insists that we really take a hard “look at the system” and objectively assess the extent to which it is tilted in favour of already economically massive players. She wants us to ask the material question: “How many opportunities are there?” And to what extent are performers being sold certain fictions that make them more vulnerable to being exploited? For example, she says that performing just for exposure is basically “a big lie.” As she puts it: “what are you exposing yourself to?” if not a market in which “there are no standards.” Efforts like the ones that CASC organizes, like the #PayComedians viral campaign, work to establish standards of equitable pay and recognition of structural inequality. These campaigns are showing what is possible: giving comics a bigger piece of the revenue they create, exposing the power of a few players that, Sandra points out, “feel like they can” corral and control comedians, and reckoning with the fear that individual comedians may have, which tends to work against solidarity and take away their power to resist monopolistic control. The main theme here is probably autonomy. Sandra has this sense that building “our own stuff” here means that you’re generating the “spirit… to move forward.” I appreciated all of the detail she gave on the struggle to gain official recognition and government funding. Ultimately, she says that she’s not interested in having a theoretical argument about whether comedy is art; the question, for her, is “should it be supported?” For me, the answer to that question is definitely yes, because I agree with Battaglini that comedy is a more everyday, accessible artform than most. This is such a central part of its power: humour makes people more open to having difficult conversations, it’s “non-elitist,” in Sandra’s words, and so it often allows for a more lively form of connection to occur. I loved the point she makes here about how comedy is also way more immediate than many artforms: happening every night, and expresses in real time what it means to live in a particular place. That immediacy is a huge part of its appeal, its relevance, and a reason it should be better supported by the public.

Armond R. Towns is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. His research and teaching focuses on the relationship between media, communication, race, blackness, and history. He’s just released an amazing book called On Black Media Philosophy with University of California Press. And he’s also the cofounder and editor of the brand new journal Communication and Race, which will start publishing issues in 2024. In this conversation, we dwell with the sprawling, exciting claims of his new book On Black Media Philosophy. And one of the central theoretical problems in that book is the question of what is left unsaid in the influential work of Marshall McLuhan, a figure who still has a lingering impact within media studies especially, particularly in Canada. Towns talks about how encountering McLuhan’s thinking was “eye-opening”, and most of all because he was exposed first to media studies in the United States, where the primary focus tends to be on representation itself, the content of the text, rather than the medium. McLuhan’s work offered Towns a really interesting corrective to that tendency, but when he started to dig into McLuhan’s writing, he found some notable gaps, especially around race. So what was unsaid in McLuhan became in some ways more important than what was said—which often gets reduced to the phrases we’re all familiar with: “the medium is the message,” the “global village,” and so on. McLuhan has an impact on Towns’ thinking, but Towns is really trying to act back on McLuhan’s impact by asking why McLuhan is invested in notions of the “tribal” and “de-tribal.” Why is he citing who he is citing? Why is he writing letters to people like J. C. Carothers? So his book, through what he calls a “practice of reading” that is deeply historical, aims to complicate the legacy of people like McLuhan, and others too, like Charles Darwin, for which there is an already established history that may obscure more than it reveals. How do we “break that logic,” as Towns puts it? A logic that frames Africa as a purely “natural” place from which “objects are extracted”? And what are the implications of aiming to break that logic for politics? I was really struck, in reading his work and talking to him, by the way he approaches this through the radical concept of climate reparations, and the destruction of the natural environment. How, as he says, it goes hand in hand with the destruction of particular people. He pushes us, in framing these ideas, to approach reparations as more than just a financial question. Reparations means taking seriously how land, water, and space have been partitioned, poisoned and commodified, and realizing that the question “Where are people going to go?” is going to be central in a future where we see innumerable climate refugees fleeing the sacrifice zones. So much of what he’s writing about really comes from this emphasis on “historical situatedness in all of our thought.” He makes it clear that, “as a Black scholar, bringing in that historical context changes the theory” for him. Maybe my biggest takeaway here was this idea that there has been a systematic neutralizing of radical thought within institutional settings. He explains how there’s been a “neoliberal shift” since the 1970s toward inclusion in the “project of higher education” and at the state level, with elected officials. As a “Black middle class” emerged, he says we saw radical demands “replaced by a more liberal” institutional politics that enshrines “mastery” and the logic of the “expert.” This made “things that were once radical… profitable.” The challenge, then, I suppose, becomes figuring out a way to maintain real traction, a means of preserving “revolutionary thought,” without succumbing to what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has called “elite capture.”

Janelle Niles is a stand-up comedian from Truro, Nova Scotia and the producer of Got Land?, an all-Indigenous comedy tour. The Got Land? show is an example of what greater solidarity could mean for the culture of comedy in Canada. The stated goal of the show is to “express solidarity with humour” as a way of gaining grassroots control over the sites of cultural production: the venues, shows, institutions and platforms that determine who makes it and who gets missed in comedy. We discuss Janelle’s ability to use humour to cope with some of the most difficult subjects imaginable. Beyond just the joy of making other people laugh, we know that humour can also be a kind of survival strategy. So, COVID-19, we also know, has devastated creative communities, and it has created a level of suffering in communities of colour that should show us, unequivocally, how present and immediate the legacies of systemic oppression are in Canada. Niles talks about her hustle here, which she says is required to fight that system; but the point of solidarity is that the status quo can’t be changed by one person alone. Her ambition is to construct a legacy of comradeship and mutual care, one that is real and formidable enough to fight deeply unfair forms of exclusion. One of the things that Janelle says that I really appreciate here is that “people are not politically aware” in Canada. That’s an important baseline, in a way. It implies having to be sort of pragmatic about communication, and comedy, she says, is an extremely intuitive communicational art. She describes this feeling of having been “born political,” not only because she is Black and Indigenous, but because her experience of racism in Canada has opened her eyes to the scale of racial inequality in this country. A certain kind of racism exists within the culture of comedy in Canada. Niles describes the experience of a Black comedian in Montreal who was told that if there was more than one Black comic on a bill, then the show would be “too ghetto, too ethnic.” As she puts it, this attitude means that, in effect, people of colour are still either the “token” performer on a white-dominated bill, or not included at all. And she wants to “dismantle that.” The watchword here is this notion of “audacity.” Janelle makes connections between how the Idle No More movement, which is ten years old and going strong, provided the grassroots opportunity to “speak the truth” and push to be heard and respected. It reminded First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples in the place currently called Canada that it’s “unfair” to be pushed into a point in the past, to be pressured into invisibility and intimidated out of asserting basic rights. Niles doubles down and says that Got Land? is like “Idle No More with jokes,” it insists on the audacity of BIPOC comedy and the fact of her presence on this land, now. In this context, she talks about trying to be “truthful, transparent and come from a place of love” while working to ensure that she never has to “justify” her existence. She says she is willing to go to difficult places and break down “misconceptions one joke at a time.”

Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. While her research covers a lot of topics, the work she’s created that has had the biggest impact on me is her writing on the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, and the creation and maintaining of gender classifications in law and medicine. The book that we focus on here is the one she put out through University of California Press in 2018: Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520275041/trans-kids). This book is teeming with insights on how we acquire a gendered sense of ourselves, the powerful constraints placed on that process, and how those constraints are both generative and restrictive. We talk about the overarching concerns of Meadow’s work and the curiosities that motivate it, but we also work through the claims of Emily Bazelon’s controversial article in the New York Times from June of this year, “The Battle Over Gender Therapy.” Meadow explains that the way Bazelon gives “equal footing” to those that problematize gender-related care is actually very misleading, because we’ve luckily reached a point, after a history of struggle for legitimacy from groups advocating for transgender rights, where it’s no longer assumed, professionally or politically, that avoiding being trans is somehow “the best outcome.” There is, now, what Meadow describes as a “massive consensus” which says that “affirming and facilitating gender nonconformity in children leads to better psychological, social, educational, physical outcomes for those children.” What also clearly matters is who is speaking, and who isn’t. Because of the power of gender norms, and the compulsion to protect kids from harm, many parent organizations that advocate for trans identities, but are not led by transgender adults, often make it their goal to produce or to promote “the most normative non-normative kids.” The effect, in some ways, is to “create a version of transness without trauma,” and one that doesn’t necessarily learn from what Meadow calls the “incredible wisdom gleaned from decades of navigating cisgender culture.”