5 Objects Podcast| A conversation with Anna Feigenbaum

I recently read Anna’s, incredible book, “Tear Gas — From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today”, that tells the story of how a chemical weapon went from the battlefield to the streets. In this conversation, we speak about her work, how she came to write the history of tear gas, as both the history of state violence and resistance.

I asked Anna for five things that have influenced her intellectual and political journeys, and she picked

1. Donna Haraway – Cyborg Manifesto 

2. Adrienne Rich – Cartographies of Silence (poem)

3. Capitalism is the Crisis Banner 

4. Woomera Fence 

Protesters rip down the fence at the Woomera detention center, freeing many asylum seekers imprisoned under inhumane conditions. Australia, 2002.5. Photo – US Troops use Tear Gas on Bonus Army 

US troops use tear gas on Bonus Army

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Suchitra Vijayan is the author of the critically acclaimed book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (Melville House, New York) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (Pluto Press). She is an award-winning photographer and the founder and executive director of the Polis Project, a New York-based magazine of dissent. She teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University, and is the Chairperson of the International Human Rights Committee. Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric Literature, NPR, NBC, Time, and BBC. As an attorney, she worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo for Iraqi refugees.