Psychic Militancy

I was SO excited to have a dear comrade and incredible filmmaker and professor Mtume Gant on the show for the first time! If you don't know him already from his incredible art, his new film, The Hand that Feeds, or from his co-hosting of The Imperial 80s with our comrade Jared Ware of Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, THIS IS YOUR CHANCE! I was so happy to continue our conversation from his podcast, Within Our Gates, linked below. We explored the ways that cinema and cinematic practices recreate a social order intent on stabilizing imperialism and racial capitalism, get into his new film, and his new writing—let me tell you how excited I am to delve into this!! And, maybe, just maybe, psychoanalysis, of course, the good (ahem, Fanon), the bad, and the seriously hideous.
Mtume Gant is a Filmmaker/Artist, Political Theorist and Educator. He is the director of several films, most recently The Hand that Feeds and an Assistant Professor of Film at Purchase College. He is the host of Within Our Gates podcast where he looks at cinema and the arts from a materialist perspective, as well as the co-host of The Imperial 80's YouTube series, an anti-imperialist analysis of 80's cinema. He is currently finishing his first book The Three Cinemas, a guide book on how to use the frameworks of Third Cinema as a tool for revolutionary analysis and practice. 
Find Mtume's podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/within-our-gates/id1793170342
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I am releasing this episode out of order because it is an urgent report back from our Palestinian siblings from Al-Mughayyir, one of the Palestinian villages in the West Bank that is incurring increasing state and settler violence (one and the same, we know). Their testimony is moving, as it traces the ongoing asphyxiation of their village, the longstanding policies of attacks on life and life-making, including the ability for folks to sustain their lives through farming, the intrusions on intimate spaces of life, as well as their ongoing resistance and refusals to disappear from the land.
Danyal Masoud is a certified spiritual and life coach with a Master's degree in Marriage and Family Counseling and a Bachelor's degree in Social Sciences. For more than 22 years, her work has centered around children, youth, women, and families, with a deep passion for helping people grow emotionally, spiritually, and relationally. Follow her on IG at: @danyal_pali @danyal.masoud
Hana Masud, MA, PhD is a Palestinian scholar and educator working at the intersection of critical psychology, decolonial inquiry, and social justice scholarship. She co-authored and implemented CURCUM's Trees: A Decolonial Healing Guide for Palestinian Community Health Workers, including training and supervising community health workers in refugee camps in the occupied West Bank, and co-edited the special issue Coloniality Unplugged: Cosmologies and Terrains of the Dark Matter in the Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice (2022). She is also a co-founder of the Project Laban Collective, an emerging diasporic community space for relational care, community knowledge, critical consciousness, organizing, and explorations of sanctuary and world-making.
Amin Al-Zaghoul has served as the head of the Al-Mughayyir Village Council for the past nine years. During his tenure, he has been arrested twice, his home has been raided more than ten times, and his sons have been arrested on more than three occasions. Most recently, his son Jihad Al-Zaghoul was arrested two days ago and remains in detention. He has not yet been released.

I joined my dear comrade Nick Estes from the Red Nation podcast (follow them here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheRedNation) and we got to use my book as a springboard to talk about a wide range of issues--I really loved this conversation and always feel fortified after being in conversation with Nick.
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I am SO excited for this episode to come out on audiostream--if you haven't seen the video yet, definitely check it out. I was joined by some kickass clinician comrades who are all actively thinking through how we defy the carceral logics of the psy-fields, how to resist imperial cooptation, how to push against the seams of normative fuckery, and all the struggles and contradictions inherent to doing the work of therapy. We had a LOT to talk about and I am happy you all get front a row to this conversation I have been wanting to have for a longgggggg time.
Melissa Lopez, aka Mel is a Fat, Queer, Chicanx Femme- She's been an antagonistic and unruly mental health therapist for 21 years. Her practice includes working with people of various interlocking oppressions through an anti imperialist, anti white supremacy lens (she doesn't give one fuck about "evidence based modalities)." Hobbies include pissing off white people, hating on something or another, obsessing over cats, raccoons, & Halloween/horror. The Coven, are the cats and dogs that make up her family.
Naa Adaku is a social worker who likes to giggle alot and calls herself an anti imperialist horse mom. She is known as her neighborhoods friendly rebel in Ghana usually walking barefoot with a pack of dogs surrounding her or riding long distance motocross bikes. Her interests are china-africa relations, anti-blackness, African sovereignty and the eradication of femicide in Africa.
Dana is a social worker, psychotherapist, parent and comrade committed to a better world for all our children and all life on earth.  She lives in US-occupied Puerto Rico which is her partner's ancestral home with their child, 2 cats and 7 chickens.  Interests are anti-imperialism, disalienating psychotherapy, confronting liberals, feeding people, and quality time with her child and comrades. 
Don't forget to subscribe to our channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PsychicMilitancy and for pre-releases and bonus content, consider becoming a paid patreon at: www.patreon.com/psychicmilitancy
Find us on IG: @psychicmilitancypod

I sat down with the brilliant Charisse Burden-Stelley, aka, Dr. CBS . We packed so much into this interview, including us shooting the shit toward the end a bit, BUT, the more important things that I am so excited for you all to hear are what we have come to know and appreciate Dr. CBS for, and why she is someone I see and feel practices psychic militancy. We discussed her thoughts about anti-communism in the settler colony of the USA, ongoing anti-Blackness, who she has learned from through her career, and the political demands on us, especially as leftists, in this particular moment.
Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University and a 2026-2027 Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is the author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, the co-author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and the co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing and of Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State. She is a member of Black Alliance for Peace, the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective, and Community Movement Builders.
You can find Dr. CBS and her This is America Project on IG: @dr.cbs_
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