Starting in the autumn of 2025, the US began attacking small civilian boats in or near Venezuelan waters, summarily executing over 126 people. January, 2026 began with it kidnapping Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and bringing them to the US. This month, just weeks after the kidnapping, Haymarket Books published the immensely useful and urgent book, Venezuela in Crisis. The historical range of the book begins with the regime of Hugo Chavez and ends with the 2024 elections in Venezuela.

We are immensely fortunate to be able to speak with the editor and translator of this collection of essays, Anderson Bean, and two of its contributors, Emiliano Terán and Simón Rodríguez.  The key argument of the book is that, even by his own admission, Chavez was not able to completely transform Venezuela into a socialist state. The book explains the roots of this failure, despite the inspiring successes of Chavismo. It then tracks an ever-increasing neoliberal and oppressive trend carried forward by Maduro, which is characterized by burgeoning extractivism, corruption, and suppression of human rights.  We end by calling on socialists and progressives everywhere to resist the tendency to side with Maduro’s false claims to socialism, and to focus instead on building solidarity with the people of Venezuela.

Anderson Bean is a sociology professor at North Carolina A&T State University, a member of the Tempest Collective, and a North Carolina–based activist and editor. He is a contributor to Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives (Haymarket Books) and the author of Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis (Lexington Books).

Simón Rodríguez is a Venezuelan socialist writer and journalist. He was a student organizer and later became professor at the Universidad de los Andes. When he was a member of the national leadership of the Socialism and Freedom Party, he ran as a candidate for the National Assembly in 2015. He is a founding member of Laclase.info and Venezuelanvoices.org and has published articles in Humania del Sur, NACLA Report on the Americas, The New Arab, and Rebelión and on dozens of electronic outlets, and his articles have been translated into six languages. He has given talks and lectures in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. He is coauthor with Miguel Sorans of the book Why Did Chavismo Fail? A Left-Opposition Balance Sheet.

Emiliano Terán is a sociologist from the Central University of Venezuela and has a master’s degree in ecological economics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a PhD candidate in environmental science and technology at the same institution. He is also an associate researcher at the Center for Development Studies in Venezuela and a member of the Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela

Today I have the true honor of speaking with journalist, storyteller, historical researcher, and Native American ceremonial dancer Julian Brave Noisecat about his book, We Survived the Night.  This highly original book blends many voices and registers, from both well-known but also buried and purposefully obscured historical archives, to tribal and family stories.  Foremost are the legends and adaptations of the Coyote figure—which haunts, inspires, deceives, and, yes, teaches lessons that help Indigenous peoples survive the night. We spend some time talking about how Coyote is many things at once, but not all the time, we discuss notions of purity and mixedness, multiplicity and singularity, truth and lies, and come out on the side of generosity, love, and creativity, to make worlds that deserve not only to survive, but also to thrive.

Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer and student of Salish art and history. His first documentary, Sugarcane, directed alongside Emily Kassie, follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school NoiseCat’s family was sent to near Williams Lake, British Columbia. Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. The film was recognized with dozens of awards including Best Documentary from the National Board of Review and was nominated for an Academy Award. A proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie, NoiseCat’s first book, We Survived the Night, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House Canada, and Profile Books in October 2025 and was an instant national bestseller in Canada with translations forthcoming from Albin Michel in France, Aufbau Verlag in Germany, Iperborea in Italy, and Libros del Asteroide in Spain.

NoiseCat’s journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker and has been recognized with many awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize, which honors “excellence in long-form, narrative or deep reporting on stories about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape.” In 2021, NoiseCat was named to the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders alongside the starting point guard of his fantasy basketball team, Luka Doncic.

Today I am deeply honored to spend time with poet, activist, and scholar Jamaica Osorio. Shortly after October 7, 2023, she began to write a series of astonishing poems about the war in Gaza and the genocide. Osorio graces us with readings of some of those poems, and engages in a rich, complex, and deeply moving discussion of what went into their composition. Throughout, we talk about the power of poetry to suspend time and allow us the space to contemplate the impossible.  We talk about the nature of not knowing, of the inexpressible, and the ways certain poems can give us the strength, energy, and commitment to persist in working for the liberation of all peoples, even when dwelling in grief.

Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist / activist / scholar / storyteller born and raised in Pālolo Valley to parents Jonathan and Mary Osorio. Jamaica earned her PhD in English (Hawaiian literature) in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Currently, Jamaica is an Associate Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In 2020 her poetry and activism were the subject of an award-winning film, This is the Way we Rise which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2021.  In 2022 she was a lead artist and Co-writer of the revolutionary VR Documentary, On the Morning You Wake (To the end of the world),  that premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022 and won the XR experience Jury award at SXSW 2022. She is a proud past Kaiāpuni student, Ford Dissertation (2017) and Post Doctoral (2022) Fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha, Stanford University (BA) and New York University (MA). She is the author of the award winning book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea which was published in 2021 by The University of Minnesota Press. She believes in the power of aloha ʻāina and collective action to pursue liberatory, decolonial, and abolitionist futures of abundance.

Today I have the pleasure of speaking with cultural anthropologist Greta YOU-LING about her new book, Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom, a fascinating story about an indigenous group in Crimea fighting for its rights.  Uehling tells us of the complex history of the Crimean Tatars, a Sunni Muslim group who were driven off their land in 1944 by the Soviet Union. This group now finds itself caught in the Russia-Ukraine war. It has rebuffed attempts by Putin and yet also has insisted on maintaining and defending its indigenous identity and rights with regard to Ukraine. We talk about the importance of both cultural memory and political struggle in the present, and hear of Greta’s time at the barricade which Tatars set up to stem the flow of materials across their land.

Greta Uehling is a cultural anthropologist who works at the intersection of Indigenous and Eastern European Studies. She is a Teaching Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she is in the Program in International and Comparative Studies and is Associate Faculty of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. Uehling is the author of three books: Beyond Memory: The Deportation and Return of the Crimean Tatars (Palgrave 2004), Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine (Cornell University Press 2023), and Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield 2025). Throughout her career, Uehling has served as a consultant to organizations working in the fields of international migration, human rights, and human trafficking, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

On May 15, international legal experts Lara Elborno, Richard Falk, and Penny Green joined me to discuss the work of the Gaza Tribunal, a group devoted to creating an archive of facts and a set of documents and arguments to help international civil society fight against the genocide in Gaza and the Zionist regime that, along with the United States, has perpetrated this atrocity.  Today they all return to update us. They present a grim picture of what they call the final phase of genocide and note both the overwhelming global support for Palestine and the concurrent repression against advocacy and protest. This is a critical episode to listen to and share.

Lara Elborno is a Palestinian-American lawyer specialized in international disputes. She has worked for over 10 years as counsel acting for individuals, private entities, and States in international commercial and investment arbitrations. She dedicates a large part of her legal practice to pro-bono work including the representation of asylum seekers in France and advising clients on matters related to IHRL and the business and human rights framework.  She previously taught US and UK constitutional law at the Université de Paris II – Panthéon Assas. She currently serves as a board member of ARDD-Europe and sits on the Steering Committee of the Gaza Tribunal. She has moreover appeared as a commentator on Al Jazeera, TRTWorld, DoubleDown News, and George Galloway’s MOAT speaking about the Palestinian liberation struggle, offering analysis and critiques of international law.”

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.

He is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, having served for seven years as Chair of its Board. He is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He is co-director of the Centre of Climate Crime, QMUL.

Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.

His recent books include (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), Power Shift: The New Global Order (2016), Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (2017), Revisiting the Vietnam War (ed. Stefan Andersson, 2017), On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (ed. Stefan Andersson & Curt Dahlgren, 2019.

Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at QMUL and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has published extensively on state crime theory, resistance to state violence and the Rohingya genocide, (including with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, 2004 and State Crime and Civil Activism 2019). She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Kurdistan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Tunisia, Myanmar and Bangladesh. In 2015 she and her colleagues published ‘Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar’ and in March 2018 ‘The Genocide is Over: the genocide continues’. Professor Green is Founder and co-Director of the award winning International State Crime Initiative (ISCI); co-editor in Chief of the international journal, State Crime; Executive member of the Gaza Tribunal and Palestine Book Awards judge. Her new book with Thomas MacManus Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold: Myanmar and the Rohingya will be published by Rutgers university Press in 2025

On today’s episode I talk with geographer, artist, photographer, and activist Linda Quiquivix about her new book: Palestine 1492: A Report Back. Combining her work learning and working alongside the Zapatistas and Palestinians, and incorporating anti-fascist politics from the Black Panthers, Quiquivix reaches back to the 15th century to see the beginnings of the Western project to carve the surface of the planet into spaces to be both shared and wrestled over by those Above.  Instead, Linda asks us to walk side by side with those Below. She writes, “what might it look like what might it feel like, to walk with the Below? To place yourself under fire with the Below, so that the need to shake off fascism becomes a shared necessity for you, too?  I do not know, but I hope we will find out together because there’s no blueprint. From the Zapatistas I learn to ask questions as we walk.  From Aida Camp I learn sometimes we must ask questions as we jump. May we learn the answers together.”

Dr. Linda Quiquivix is a geographer, illustrator, and popular educator of Maya-Mam roots, raised by Palestinians, Zapatistas, Panthers, and jaguars. Her work centers on decolonial land struggles that  challenge us to share the world with all our difference, a world “where all worlds fit.” She is author of Palestine 1492: A Report Back (Wild Ox Books, 2024), a visual and literary exploration that weaves Palestine into global struggles across 500 years. Quiquivix is also a co-editor of “The Fourth World War: Zapatista Writings on Global Capital 1997-2023” (Paliacate Press, 2024). Learn more about her work at quiqui.org

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson about her new book, Theory of Water.  Theory of Water is a rich, complex, and deeply personal reflection on world-making and life-giving processes best captured in the fluidity of water as it circulates through all our bodies and the planet.  It is a largely collective project that enlists our listening and love, and helps us face the violence of all forms of dominance, enclosure, and containment.  We are especially gifted to have the chance to listen to one of the songs from Leanne’s album, Theory of Ice, and have her comment on it and the relation of her music to her writing.  This is a particularly special episode of Speaking Out of Place.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician.  She is the author of eight previous books, including the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies, which was short listed for the Dublin Literary prize and the Governor General’s award for fiction. Leanne’s album, Theory of Ice, released by You’ve Changed Records in 2021 and short-listed for the Polaris Prize and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Her latest project Theory of Water was published by Knopf Canada/Haymarket books in the spring of 2025.  Leanne is a member of Alderville First Nation.

Today I talk with Tao Leigh Goffe about her new, magisterial Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis.  Spanning many fields and disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities and the arts, Professor Goffe weaves together an historically rich and geographically complex picture of how capitalism and racism undergird the climate crisis in ways made invisible or benign via the work of the west’s “dark laboratory.”  Writing back through accounts of indigenous bird watching and Black provisional grounds, we talk about things as seemingly different as the massive guano industry built on Chinese and Indian labor in the 19th century to Malcolm-X’s boyhood vegetable garden in Michigan.  We talk in particular about one of the key passages of Dark Laboratory, where Tao writes:

“Still, we manage to create a poetics out of that which wishes to destroy us and the planet.  How else will we be able to live in ‘the after’? We must reassess what a problem is.  Living is not a problem, as Audrey Lorde reminds us. I would add that dying is not a problem either. Decomposing is essential to the natural order and cycle of life. Living at the expense of others is a problem.”

Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York City. For the past fifteen years she has specialized in colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. Dr. Goffe lives and works in Manhattan where she is an Associate Professor at CUNY in Black Studies. She teaches classes on literary theory and cultural history. Dr. Goffe’s book on how the climate crisis is a racial crisis is called DARK LABORATORY (Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK, 2025)). Her second book BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT, under contract with Duke University Press, presents a long history of racialization, modern finance, and indebtedness. It brings together subjects of the Atlantic and Pacific markets from 1806 to the present under European colonialism. Dr. Goffe is a fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School in racial justice. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before earning her PhD at Yale University.

Dr. Goffe’s research and curatorial work is rooted in literatures and theories of labor that center Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Committed to building intellectual communities beyond institutions, she is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, an engine for the study of race, technology, and ecology through digital storytelling. Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity, and radical coalition towards sovereignty.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I am delighted to be in conversation with Azucena Castro and Malcom Ferdinand.  We start with a discussion of what Ferdinand calls the “double fracture”—the environmental division of humans from their connection to the biosphere, and the colonial division instantiated by white supremacism and patriarchy. He insists that we not see these two phenomena as separate, rather as intimately connected. This double fracture makes any attempts to solve either environmental violence or colonial violence ineffective. In her foreword to Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecologies, Angela Y. Davis writes that as she read the book, she “recognized how perfectly his conceptualizations illuminate the frameworks we need for both philosophical and popular understandings of our planetary conditions today.” In our conversation we spend some time talking about how art, film, and poetry can manifest some of those frameworks, and we are delighted have Azucena take us into a deep discussion of this, and also to read two poems in Spanish and then in English translation and have Malcom gloss them for us.

Azucena Castro is assistant professor at Rice University in Houston. Currently, she is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Center, Faculty of Science, Stockholm University. She held positions as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Latin American and Caribbean cultures at Stanford University and cultural geography at the Institute of Geography, University of Buenos Aires. Her scholarly work focuses on 20th and 21st-century Latin American cultural products through the lens of climate and energy justice, multispecies resistance, and anti-extractivist critique in the artivist scenes of South America, particularly, Southern Cone and Brazil. Azucena is the author of the book Poetic Postnatures. Ecological Thinking and Politics of Strangeness in Contemporary Latin American Poetry, Series SubAtlantic at De Gruyter (2025). She has edited the volume Futuros multiespecie. Prácticas vinculantes para un planeta en emergencia (Bartlebooth. Critical Spaces, 2023), and co-edited the Essay Cluster “GeoSemantics: Earthly Memories and Inhuman Becomings in the Global South” at ASAP/Journal. As part of her engagement with community-based research and collaborative filmmaking, she has co-developed the energy justice project “No aire, no te vendas” (Penn Environmental Humanities, University of Pennsylvania) focusing on winds in ancient cosmologies and human communities in the Afro-Wayúu territories of La Guajira, Colombia in the intersection of old and green extractivism.

Malcom Ferdinand is an environmental engineer from University College London and doctor in political philosophy from Université Paris Diderot. He is now a researcher at the CNRS (IRISSO/University Paris Dauphine). At the crossroad of political philosophy, postcolonial theory and political ecology, his research focuses on the Black Atlantic and particularly the Caribbean. He explores the relations between current ecological crises and the colonial history of modernity. He published a book based on his PhD dissertation entitled Decolonial Ecology: Thinking of Ecology from the Caribbean World.( Polity 2021) that challenges classical environmental thoughts. He recently published  an in-depth study of the pesticide contamination of martinique and Guadeloupe entitled  S’aimer la Terre: défaire  l’habiter colonial ( Seuil 2024).

Today on Speaking Out of Place I have the honor of talking with Professor Christen A Smith on a new book she has co-edited entitled, The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento. Smith explains that “Beatriz Nascimento was a critical figure in Brazil’s Black Movement until her untimely death in 1995. Although she published only a handful of articles before she died and left only a few other recorded thoughts, her ideas about the symbolic relationship between quilombos (Afro-Brazilian maroon societies) and black subjectivity encourage us to re-imagine the meaning of Black liberation from a transnational, Black feminist perspective.”  Our conversation delves into Nascimento’s rich and complex cultural and intellectual productions, and talk about everything from her films and essays to her student papers, which Smith and her co-editors include in their volume. Nascimento was also a poet, and we are grateful that Christen graces us with reading two poems in Portuguese and then in English translation.

Christen A. Smith is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of the book, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil  (University of Illinois Press, 2016), co-author of the book The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (Princeton University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Black Feminist Constellations: Black Women in Dialogue and Translation (University of Texas Press, 2023). In 2017, she started Cite Black Women—a transnational initiative that she began in 2017 that draws attention to Black women’s intellectual contributions as well as the race and gender inequalities of citational politics.