Joining me on Within Our Gates is Animator and Scholar to Samantha Youssef to talk about the entertainment industry and how it uses often initially well meaning artists to uphold Hollywood's imperial messaging system. Samantha and I take a deep and personal dive into our experiences in the training grounds of arts/entertainment, we compare and contrast our similarities and differences but ultimately come to conclusions that all the methods point in the same pernicious direction.

Its a great talk and look forward to more with Samantha on these topics.

Here are some things to check out that feature Samantha speaking about her work and experiences.

Is Superman Pro-Watermelon?

True Hollywood Stories on the Military Industrial Complex

"We See the Audience as Marks!" the Psychology of Manipulation in Film

Encoding Empire: How Black Panther Manufactures Consent for Imperialism Among Oppressed Groups

Donald Duck Does D.E.I.

To get a jump on the shows a few days early, bonus video episodes every month, deeper dives into text and works with revolutionary content and political art study groups check out Mtume's Patreon and become a subscriber!

Additionally, check out my new colaboration The Imperial 80's, a series I co-hosted with Jared Ware of Millenials are Killing Capitalism. We take a dive into the wild world of 80's Hollywood and uncover what it has to say about this imperial project called The United States. You can find us on Patreon and make sure to follow the channel if you want to catch the livestreams

Tumes

Joining me for this episode is writer and political theorist Sudip Bhattacharya as we dig into Mira Nair's cult favorite film Mississippi Masala. We dig into its attempt to have commentary on the conundrums of cross cultural exchange and how the film fits into the trajectory of liberal diversity projects in American Cinema during the early 90's. We also fit this into work Sudip has done on the topic of culture from a socialist/Marxist perspective in order to deepen our convo on what was/is missing then and now in works like Masala and others.

We also have some great digressions talking about Domenico Losurdo's work, the conservative nature of Spike Lee, the Birth of a Nation level racism of Indiana Jones Temple of Doom and the grave problem of socialist groups like Platypus Affiliated Society. Its a top notch convo and the first of many to come with Sudip.

Enjoy and let me know what you think!

The Hampton Reader

To get a jump on the shows a few days early, bonus video episodes every month, deeper dives into text and works with revolutionary content and political art study groups check out Mtume's Patreon and become a subscriber!

Currently we are hosting a asynchronous study group talking about Ariel Dorfman & Armand Mattelart's classic text How to Read Donald Duck. We will going for the rest of the month so join up now!

Also check out my new colaboration The Imperial 80's co-hosted series beginning with Jared Ware of Millenials are Killing Capitalism.

We will be posting the audio recordings of the episode here but make sure to follow the channel if you want to catch the livestreams

How are the arts in the vaunted "age of tech" affected? And how do we study these effects with a materialist approach? To answer these questions I have with me Dwayne Monroe who is a technologist with decades of experience in the US and Europe. He intimately knows how technologies the media describes as ethereal really work, where they come from, and how they are used in the multinational corporations and governments dominating our lives. He applies what he calls a Noir Marxist lens (stylistically informed by the work of Raymond Chandler, analytically informed by Marxian materialism) to dissecting the tech industry.

We have a fantastic conversation covering everything from so called Artificial Intelligence, how the creative class is a deployment zone for tech industry shenanigans, the sordid history of camera technology within the world atomic bomb testing and military projects and what radicals need to consider when integrating tech in their lives and organizations. Its really an important convo and one of the first of many I plan to have with Dwayne.

For some links to Dwayne's work check it here:

My main blog, 'Computational Impacts' -

https://monroelab.com

Verdigris (the literary journal I started with a few friends, I typed the wrong URL in the label I used for the show) -

https://vdgasjournal.com

The film podcast, Film Conversations (we talk about films and the industry overall from a grounded perspective) -

https://open.spotify.com/show/3E5dPk4of0pFAVdcTjGbzy

And here is a link to the film we discussed in the episode:

https://youtu.be/XdrVWeXYUog?si=Kvh9ApjSzo90hSaw

Also two of Dwayne's recent appearances on MAKC:
https://www.youtube.com/live/TLue-ZDo04Y?si=vvF7gKK3NOjwOASN

https://www.youtube.com/live/OxQ_EWinHtA?si=ns-6ZXUpyTKC2r-G

To get a jump on the shows a few days early, bonus video episodes every month, deeper dives into text and works with revolutionary content and political art study groups check out Mtume's Patreon and become a subscriber!

Currently we are hosting a asynchronous study group talking about Ariel Dorfman & Armand Mattelart's classic text How to Read Donald Duck. We will going for the rest of the month so join up now!

Also check out my new colaboration The Imperial 80's co-hosted series beginning with Jared Ware of Millenials are Killing Capitalism.

We will be posting the audio recordings of the episode here but make sure to follow the channel if you want to catch the livestreams

Is it Black Cinema or Black Hollywood? To me this is an essential question and for this reason I had to bring on Filmmaker Chad Murdock to talk about with me. We dig into a piece that Chad written called The False Notions of a Blackened Image where he does a material analysis on images that are routinely dispersed currently throughout popular Black movies. We also speak about his recently released film, Phantom of a Killing, and dig into the origins of Chad's development as an artist, his politicization and how thats informed his mode of production. We go a lot of angles, dig into a lotta artists from Ousmane Sembene to Yukio Mishima. Its rich and robust and frankly will be the first of many!

Chad also has a special on-line screening of his work on Write Brain TV this Thursday July 24th at 6pm EST Check it out!

For more on Chad's work check his website.

To get a jump on the shows a few days early, bonus video episodes every month, deeper dives into text and works with revolutionary content and political art study groups check out Mtume's Patreon and become a subscriber!

Currently we are hosting a asynchronous study group talking about Ariel Dorfman & Armand Mattelart's classic text How to Read Donald Duck. We will going for the rest of the month so join up now!

Also check out my new colaboration The Imperial 80's co-hosted series beginning with Jared Ware of Millenials are Killing Capitalism.

We will be posting the audio recordings of the episode here but make sure to follow the channel if you want to catch the livestreams

This week I'm joined by Julia Alekseyeva to talk their book Antifascism and the Avant- Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960's published by University of California Press. Julia is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania as well an artist and activist. We have a fantastic conversation about the book which covers the leftist filmmakers of Japan and France who helped revolutionize the documentary form (and cinema overall) and what does this period of radical practice inform us about cinema, and the politics of art both in form and content more broadly. Its a rich conversation that has many angles, I think you will all enjoy!

I highly recommend picking up the text and following Julia's work.

To get a jump on the shows a few days early, bonus video episodes every month, deeper dives into text and works with revolutionary content and political art study groups check out Mtume's Patreon and become a subscriber!

Currently we are hosting a asynchronous study group talking about Ariel Dorfman & Armand Mattelart's classic text How to Read Donald Duck. We will going for the rest of the month so join up now!

I also have a special co-hosted series beginning with my friends over at Millenials are Killing Capitalism called The Imperial 80's. We kick off July 15th at 10AM with Sylvester Stallone's First Blood. It will be exciting!

Tumes

Peace Comrades!

For this episode I am joined by two great guests who I plan to have here regularly to discuss Paul Schrader's 1978 film, Blue Collar starring Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel.

Jared Ball is a professor of communication studies and Africana / Black Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Ball is also host of the podcast “iMiXWHATiLiKE!” and a co-founder of Black Liberation Media.

Jared Ware is the co-host of the anti-imperialist podcast Millennials are Killing Capitalism, and also the host their livestreams.

We take a deep dive into Schraders film, with a strong emphasis of the history that lies within the film, and also wrestle with the living history Schrader looks to exclude from the film. Through this process we come to conclusions around the political unconscious that lie in the film and American ideology overall.

Its an exciting convo, looking forward to folks thoughts and responses!

Note - if my mic is not as robust as usual is because of a recording mistake I made. Its all clear, and I did some good treatment of it in post, but its not to my standard. The two Jared's sound fantastic though, and thats whats important, ha!

To get a jump on the shows a few days early, bonus video episodes every month, deeper dives into text and works with revolutionary content and political art study groups check out Mtume's Patreon and become a subscriber!

Tumes

This week I have my dear friend Marcus Pinn from the longstanding film blog Pinnland Empire with me. Marcus and I have a more freewheeling talk focused around written pieces that come from the both of us, one is Marcus's review of the film Sinners and the other is my critique from a few years ago of the film Get Out. Where they connect is Marcus's (on-point) analysis that Black Hollywood has entered a period of "Get Out-Sploitation" films, and how Sinners, amongst others, fits the mold.

This is a necessary convo where we unpack whats been happening, and the pernicious character of this crop of Black Hollywood.

To get a jump on the shows a few days early and also recieve up 1 bonus video episode on per month, deeper dives into text and works with revolutionary content and political art study check out Mtume's Patreon and become a subscriber!

Tumes

This week I'm happy to have Yasmin Nair back with me to talk about Francis Ford Coppola's classic film The Conversation.

The idea came to us after the recent passing of Gene Hackman and both of us speaking about the respect we have for much of the work Hackman did as an actor over the years. It led us to one of his finer films, The Conversation, which is also one of Coppola's very best works. In our investigation about the film, we dig into conversations around the surveillance state, the American obsession with privacy, the character of the American businessman and much more. It’s a rich conversation.

Yasmin will also be back in the near future to do some discussion on the work of Stuart Hall which I am really looking forward to!

If you would like to check out more of Yasmin's work (and you should) you can go to her website: https://yasminnair.com/ Looking forward to hearing folks' thoughts on the episode!

To get a jump on the shows a few days early and also recieve up 1 bonus video episode on per month, deeper dives into text and works with revolutionary content and political art study check out Mtume's Patreon and become a subscriber!

Tumes