Episode Details

This month on Laura Flanders and Friends, we’re revisiting conversations around the earth, the natural world and climate justice in action. This week, Survival Guide for Humans Learned from Marine Mammals with Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

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Description: Are you drowning? This year hasn’t been smooth sailing for many of us — with extreme temperatures, and other crises. How do we take a breath? Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ UNDROWNED: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, draws on the practices of marine mammals — they are the experts, after all, in not drowning. (The harbor seal can slow its breath to about four beats per minute!) The book landed her the prestigious 2022 Whiting Prize for nonfiction, and now she is working on a biography of Audre Lorde. Plus, she is bringing people together through Soul Sanctuary, retreats that center a Black, feminist and queer vision. Join Laura and Gumbs for a conversation on how we can all practice “another way to breathe.”  Music featured in the middle of the radio show and podcast is the title track of Samora Pinderhughes’ “Transformation Suite”.

“This is an offering towards evolution, towards our evolution, towards the possibility that instead of continuing the trajectory of slavery, entrapment, separation, and domination, and making our atmosphere unbreakable, we might instead practice another way to breathe.” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

“The context of undrowning, breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we do every day, in the choke hold of racial, gendered, ableist capitalism. We are still undrowning. And by we, I don't only mean people like myself whose ancestors specifically survive the middle passage.” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Guest:

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Poet, Author, Independent Scholar & Activist

Watch the episode released on YouTube; PBS World Channel nationally airing Sundays at 11:30am ET and on over 300 public stations across the country (check your listings, or search here via zipcode). Listen: Episode airing on community radio (check here to see if your station airs the show) & available as a podcast.

Full Episode Notes are located HERE.

Related Podcast:  Full uncut conversation is available in the podcast feed.

Music Credit: “Transformation Suite” by Samora Pinderhughes, "Ripples" by Ketsa, "Steppin" by Podington Bear, and original sound design by Jeannie Hopper

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Related Books:

“Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, published by AK Press as part of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy Series 

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