Tank Magazine Podcast

Vijay Prashad is a historian, journalist and the director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research as well as the author of several books including the Darker Nations and Washington Bullets. Vijay joins us to discuss the history surrounding Roberto Fernandez Retamar's landmark essay Caliban (1971), a piece situated in a rich history of debate surrounding the emergence of sovereignty in the colonised world.

At Soft Network in New York, an investigation into the archive of the late Turkish-American photographer Sheyla Baykal sheds new light on the downtown community of which she was a vital figure. Berk Korkmaz discusses the powerful legacy she leaves behind.

For our summer reader issue, we decided to read some smut. That the production of romance literature is the only thing keeping the publishing industry afloat may prove a damning fact for those disposed against it, but how much of this distaste is bias? In this essay, Amelia McGarvey analyses the state of the industry and what it means for both our conception of literature and our relationship to sex.

Vicky, Lom, Becky and Sommai left home to sell sex in Europe, to support the families they love and chase dreams of their own. Anthropologist Sine Plambech spent two decades alongside them. Here, she reads from “Global Sex: What Sex Workers Know About Love and Capitalism”, the book she made from those years of field notes.

Following the success of her first book, Notes on a Foreign Country, Suzy Hansen's From Life Itself chronicles life under rising authoritarianism in Turkey. In the small neighbourhood of Karagümrük, local concerns over national identity and immigration serve as a metonym for the country, and indeed the world, at large. Here, she reads an excerpt from the new book.