We take a deep dive with 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winner Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (among many other books). We will also be joined by scholar and activist Aviva Chomsky, (author of Undocumented and “They Take Our Jobs!” and 20 Other Myths about Immigration).
- As the 2020 Election draws near, how do we understand the nature of Trumpism and its relationship to what has come before?
- How do we grasp the rise of Trump’s Border Wall and the way it is re-shaping US political imagination?
- How has U.S. American history from the beginning been shaped by the way that the edges of the country have been imagined and constructed–often through racism and violence?
- How does grappling with the long and bloody American history of the “frontier” and the border change the way we see the present politics and future possibilities for the USA in the 21st century?
- How does studying the history of the border help us to see that ways that US “domestic” & “foreign” policy are deeply related?
- What will the “end” of the long-standing myth of perpetual American economic and geographic expansion mean for contemporary politics?
- What can be done to refuse a future defined by rising border walls and to instead reimagine global human liberation in this era of crisis?