Today I am delighted to talk with Professor Malini Johar Schueller about her new book, Teaching Solidarity: Critical Race Reading recently published by the University of California Press. We talk about the long history of anti-racist education and the attacks on it by the Right. In particular, we look at the onslaught of federal and state repression since the first Trump regime, and conservative incursions onto campuses take the form of surveillance of syllabi, classrooms, public events, and the establishing of conservative centers. We finish by talking about what Schuller calls critical race reading, a manner of presenting and discussing texts that develops an understanding of structural violence, and critical ways of engaging with literature that enables civil and political engagement. We press the point that these attacks, instrumentalizing the idea of student “discomfort,” severely underestimate students’ hunger for knowledge and their ability to withstand so-called discomfort in the search for truth. 

Malini Johar Schueller is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida.  She is the faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine and was the advisor for Jewish Voice for Peace and is a member of the organizing collective for the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.  She is the author of several books including U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (1998), Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship (2009), and Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan (2019).  She has co-edited Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism (2007) and Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (2009). She is the director of an award-winning documentary, In His Own Home (2015) about police brutality and campus militarization, based on an incident at UF is available on amazon prime.  In 2019 she was selected to participate in a Faculty Development Seminar by the Palestinian American Research Council and traveled to the West Bank. Her latest book on activist pedagogy, Teaching Solidarity: Critical Race Reading was published by the University of California Press in April 2026.  Her essays have appeared in scholarly journals as well as in popular publications such as Counterpunch, The Orlando Sentinel, and the Sarasota Herald Tribune.  She teaches courses in comparative settler colonialism, including Palestine and courses in postcolonial theory, Asian American studies, and US imperialism.