Senior Co-Editor, News, Politics, and Social Justice
Zahir Janmohamed is a Senior News Editor at Hyphen magazine, as well as the co-host of Racist Sandwich, a podcast about food, race, gender, and class. He is a 2017 fiction fellow at Kundiman.
Zahir Janmohamed
Race and Craft: An Interview with David Mura
Zahir Janmohamed - January 17, 2019
David Mura discusses his new book and how writers of color can avoid the pitfalls of self-exotification.
David Mura, the celebrated Japanese-American author who has published several books of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, has always been frustrated by the fact that books about the craft of writing are often divorced from questions of race. In his popular class at the VONA workshop for writers of color, Mura argues that a writer’s education should also include an understanding of race, gender, class and post-colonial theory.
Trump’s Travel Ban: Send us your reactions
Zahir Janmohamed - June 29, 2018
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of President Donald Trump’s travel ban, which targets the Muslim majority nations of Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen. North Korea and Venezuela are also on the travel ban list, but the courts did not weigh in on the ban against these countries.
The verdict is disappointing but expected. What is surprising is that in its decision, the Supreme Court overturned the infamous verdict in the Korematsu v. United States case that created the legal framework to justify the internment of Japanese Americans in 1944.
An Interview with Anirvan Chatterjee and Barnali Ghosh
Zahir Janmohamed - November 14, 2017
Founders of the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour
Since 2012, Anirvan Chatterjee and Barnali Ghosh have run 124 tours for 1,927 people as part of their Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour.
I met them in 2013, when I went on the two-mile walk myself. Ever since, I have been urging everyone I know to sign up. Ghosh and Chatterjee challenge the “model minority myth” and show that South Asians have been speaking up politically as far back as 1908.