Episode Details

In this episode I’m talking with Hussein Omar, who is a writer from Cairo currently based in New York City. After completing doctoral research on anticolonial political ideas in the Arab world he’s now writing a five hundred year history of Egypt as told through its cemeteries. He also writes about sexuality, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, and he organizes with Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG). Hussein’s recent essay titled Homo Zion: How Pinkwashing Erases Colonial History, is in Parapraxis Magazine. Expanding our thinking beyond the usual rejoinders to pinkwashing claims, this essay pushes us ask what it is about us that makes pinkwashing a workable tactic.

Additional resources for this conversation:

Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space (2017)

Kramer, Report from the Holocaust (1990)

Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct (1997)

Al Qaws, Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence (2020)