Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French-Russian writer of many books. The meditative, postapocalyptic noir Mevlido’s Dreams, translated by Gina M. Stamm, is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse that asks what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world. Here, Stamm is joined in conversation with Joshua Armstrong about translating this key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe.

Gina M. Stamm is assistant professor of French at the University of Alabama.

Joshua Armstrong is associate professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Mevlido’s Dreams: A Post-Exotic Novel is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“Translator Stamm does an admirable job of rendering Volodine’s serpentine prose in English, and the noirish, surrealist story turns into an unlikely romp as it riffs on the absurdity of 20th-century political institutions and pop culture.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Certainly the strangest and arguably one of the most accomplished contemporary writers of fiction in French, Antoine Volodine has created a vast and perplexing universe of bad dreams in several dozen works under a variety of pseudonyms over the past forty years. Mevlido’s Dreams provides a new pathway into Volodine’s labyrinth, which for all the horrors it recounts is always cast in stylishly crafted prose.”
—David Bellos, Princeton University

Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the early waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. Her book Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants reveals the violence and dislocation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, and follows American folk ballads back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience. A tenth-anniversary edition of the book has just been released, which includes a new preface and develops a haunting historical perspective on the ancestors we thought we knew. Here, Brooks is joined by Desmond Hassing in conversation.

Joanna Brooks is an award-winning scholar and writer whose work tends to catastrophes of human belonging in American history. The author or editor of ten books on race, religion, colonialism, and social movements, her writing has been featured in the BBC, NPR, the Daily Show, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post.

An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a San Diego native, Dr. Desmond Hassing is a conceptual artist, scholar, and activist who focuses on educating Western subjects on the intentionally disremembered subject of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. Hassing is founder of the Indigenous Peoples Reading Room, a planned open-access scholarship archive, and creator of The National Indian Project, an annotated bibliography of Native American, First Nations, and Pacific Islander representations in DC/National comic books of the same period. Hassing is lecturer in the Department of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University.

Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“A surprising, bold, and altogether brilliant contribution to our understanding of why people crossed the Atlantic to live in a strange new world.”
—Marcus Rediker

Everything Is Police is a new book by Tia Trafford, who argues that institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to colonial modernity, the result of which is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. Trafford is joined here in conversation with Melayna Lamb.

Tia Trafford is reader in philosophy and design at University for the Creative Arts in London. They are author of Everything Is Police and The Empire at Home, and coeditor of Alien Vectors.

Melayna Lamb is lecturer at the University of Law, UK, and author of A Philosophical History of Police Power.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Frank B. Wilderson III

Rinaldo Walcott

The Empire at Home / Tia Trafford

Jared Sexton

Tapji Garba

Sylvia Wynter

Frantz Fanon

Sara-Maria Sorentino

Saidiya Hartman

David Marriott

Biko Mandela Gray

Sylvia Wynter

Sara-Maria Sorentino

Mute Compulsion / Søren Mau

Immanuel Kant

William Wimsatt on generative entrenchment

Red, White & Black / Frank B. Wilderson III

The First Black Slave Society / Hilary Beckles

Sean Capener

Paul Gilroy

Stuart Hall

John Locke

Slavery is a Metaphor / essay by Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, published in Antipode

Taija McDougall

Petero Kalulé

Everything Is Police is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.