Anarchy on and off the Air

This communiqué aims to open a conversation between media scholarship and decolonial activism and to rethink everyday notions of place and practice. My take here is informed by my past and present work as a radio producer and host for three public affairs programs—one on indigenous politics and the other two focused on anarchist politics—in the context of a hybrid station: WESU, in Middletown, Connecticut.¹

From 2007 to 2013, I worked as the sole producer and host of a public affairs show, Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond, a program that was widely syndicated and focused on global indigenous struggles while acknowledging the local context in the spirit of ethical engagement with the indigenous peoples of the land where I reside and labor.² One of the aims of Indigenous Politics radio was to address the colonial politics of erasure. Notably, the conversations the radio show produced were themselves a political act against that ongoing process of indigenous erasure endemic to settler colonialism.³

Then, from September 2010 to May 2013, I also worked in collaboration with a group of students on an anarchist politics show, Horizontal Power Hour.⁴ Topics included Idle No More, prison abolition, antigentrification, migrant justice, queer liberation, and the Palestinian struggle and global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, among numerous other issues.

Currently, I coproduce and cohost a related anarchist politics show (with a new, and always evolving, group of students) called Anarchy on Air, which launched in February 2014 and includes a diverse range of subjects, including international anarchist activism, Black Lives Matter, direct action to stop deportations, the war in Syria and the refugee crisis, transgender liberation, efforts to decriminalize sex work, radical art, #NoDAPL (opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline), and political solidarity between Palestine and Native America.⁵

Both the indigenous politics show and the anarchist programs have featured radical politics with a commitment to decolonization. Unhampered by the protocols journalists are expected to abide by, the programs have created a way to discuss radical relationality between people as both mediation and activism at once. Their aim was to move "media activism" from critical and political engagement with specific media and regulatory bodies to an understanding of activism in all its forms as media and mediation. When I was involved with both the indigenous and the anarchist shows during the overlapping years, people often questioned how I could be working on both programs, as though they were so far afield from each other. Although the indigenous politics show and the anarchist radio work were distinct from each other, in terms of the programs themselves and as political projects, I understood them as related in that both challenge the assumed legitimacy and authority of the state. For me, Noam Chomsky's working definition of anarchism gets to the heart of what links these two areas, as they are both about consent politics:

Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. … It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. … They have to give a reason for it. … And if they can't justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just.⁶

As someone who identifies as indigenous, in terms of my own anarchist approach taking different forms at different times, I strive for a decolonial modality.

Here I offer just one example to get at these linkages. Members of the movement have acknowledged the anarchist roots (and guiding principles) of Occupy Wall Street, even if they themselves do not identity as anarchists.⁷ As described at Occupy's website: "Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."⁸ Occupy was a powerful movement that centered on the call to "reclaim" the commons...