Dubai, UAE — The Ananke Literature Festival 2026 will host “Notes on Decolonization in a Time of Genocide,” an online fireside chat between writer, editor and filmmaker Bhakti Shringarpure and scholar and editor Anthony Alessandrini. The conversation airs at the festival’s seventh edition, August 13–15, 2026, on Ananke’s YouTube channel and across its social media platforms.
Held fully online under the theme Fault Lines: An Unmasking, this year’s festival examines the visible and invisible fractures that shape lives across nations, communities and the self. This session turns to one of the most urgent of those fractures — the meaning of decolonial thought and practice at a moment of acute global violence — and to the everyday labour through which writers and educators keep that work alive.
About the Session
Framed as a candid exchange between two longtime interlocutors, Notes on Decolonization in a Time of Genocide is a conversation about ongoing work — as writers, teachers, editors and organizers — and about what it means to sustain intellectual and political commitments when the stakes feel overwhelming. Shringarpure and Alessandrini reflect on how decolonization has travelled from a historical process to a contested keyword, and on the responsibilities that come with using it seriously rather than as a slogan.
The discussion draws on the pair’s shared involvement in the Decolonize That! series — pocket-sized handbooks, co-published by Between the Lines and OR Books and edited by Shringarpure, that take apart the colonial assumptions embedded in everyday culture. Alessandrini is himself the author of one of its volumes, Decolonize Multiculturalism. Together they consider how such projects — accessible, collective and unafraid of complexity — model a way of doing engaged scholarship in public, and how teaching, editing and organizing can remain acts of care and solidarity even, and especially, in dark times. See the series at btlbooks.com/series/view/decolonize-that.
The Speakers
Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and filmmaker based in Paris. She is the author of Leila Aboulela: Writing as Refuge (2026) and Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019), and co-author of India’s Imperial Formations: Cultural Perspectives (2024). She edits the Decolonize That! book series and has edited the anthologies Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (2023), Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018) and Literary Sudans (2016), among others. She co-founded Warscapes magazine in 2011, now the Radical Books Collective.
Anthony Alessandrini teaches English at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn and Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Decolonize Multiculturalism and Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics, editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, and co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. A co-editor of Jadaliyya, he is on the faculty of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a co-convener of the International Solidarity Action Research Network.
A Word from Ananke
“A fireside chat is the most human of formats — two thinkers, in candid conversation, making sense of a difficult moment together. Bhakti and Anthony bring decades of writing, teaching and organizing to that fireside, and we are honoured to give this reflection a home at the festival,” said the organisers of the Ananke Literature Festival.
About the Ananke Literature Festival
Launched in 2020 by Ananke (www.anankemag.com) — a digital media and development platform focused on technology, diversity, innovation, media and literature across the Global South — the Ananke Literature Festival is a fully online event celebrated for creating meaningful conversations about the written word, publishing, diversity, empowerment and social justice. Its seventh edition, themed Fault Lines: An Unmasking, airs August 13–15, 2026, with pre-recorded sessions broadcast on Ananke’s YouTube channel and across its social media platforms. Past speakers include Urvashi Butalia, Naveen Kishore, Feryal Ali Gauhar, Mohammad Hanif, Meena Kandasamy, and many more.
