Speaking Out of Place

Today we are immensely fortunate to have two experts on Brazilian politics and workers’ movements visit Speaking Out of Place to talk about Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva’s remarkable return from defeat in the first round to a massive and historically unprecedented victory over Flavio Bolsonaro. Ruy Braga and Rebecca Tarlau explain the political and cultural landscape of Brazil, the dominance of agribusiness and evangelicalism, and the needs and demands of the different classes in Brazil. How did a combination of incredibly savvy political and media maneuvering and massive mobilization amongst young people deliver Lula an historical fourth term as president of Brazil?  We also connect this rebuttal of far right authoritarianism in Brazil with the “blue tsunami” that repudiated fascist Donald Trump in the US midterm elections during this very same period, and talk about what we need going forward to continue and grow a progressive movement in both countries.Ruy Braga is a sociologist and professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. His research focuses on precarious work, racial capitalism, and working-class politics. He is the author of several books, including The Politics of the Precariat, The Anguish of the Precariat, and Racial Capitalism: An Introduction."Rebecca Tarlau is an Associate Professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on state-society relations, social movements, and Latin American education. Her book Occupying Schools, Occupying Land (Oxford University Press, 2019) is on the educational initiatives of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement. Her forthcoming book Teacher Organizing Across the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2027) analyzes teacher activism in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.  

Six months ago, we booked a date with Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood to come back onto Speaking Out of Place and dig into the results of the elections.  Back then, we had talked about the political landscape developing around the midterms, shortly before Graham Platner withdrew from the race for Senator in Maine.  After that, Trump increased his efforts to press his underlings to get states to redistrict, at the same time he prepared the public for “rigged elections” and had ICE agents circle around polling places. MAGA poured millions and millions of dollars into races, as did billionaire Elon Musk, who concentrated hundreds of millions of dollars on races in Texas. And AIPAC spent historical amounts of money to defeat candidates like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. None of that worked.  Democrats took both the House and the Senate, which they now dominate with huge majorities in both; they flipped red state after red state, they won governors races, and elected a DSA candidate mayor of Los Angeles.  Liza and Doug talk about the public’s dramatic turn against tech oligarchs, data centers, against ICE, against the Iran war, and for an affordable life and health care.  We talk about the need for a compelling vision to move from investment in single issues and to a collective vision of democracy and people power. Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: the Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2004).  She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and is editor of False Choices: the Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She's currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai 's work for O/R Books and International Publishers and writing the introduction to that volume.Featherstone's work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., the American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, the Guardian, In These Times, and many other publications. Liza teachers at NYU 's Literary Reportage Program as well as at Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs. She is proud to be an active member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW local 7902.Doug Henwood is a Brooklyn-based journalist and broadcaster specializing in economics and politics. He edited Left Business Observer, a newsletter, from 1986–2013, and has been host of Behind the News, a weekly radio show/podcast that originates on KPFA, Berkeley, since 1995. He is the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), After the New Economy (New Press, 2004), and My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (OR Books, 2016). He’s written for numerous periodicals including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The Baffler, and Jacobin. He’s been working on a book about the rot of the US ruling class for way too long and needs to acquire the self-discipline to finish it.  

Today it is truly a special honor to welcome Alex Brostoff and to Jamille Pinheiro Dias Speaking Out of Place. This is a wide-ranging conversation, recorded right after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s surprise victory in Brazil’s presidential elections on October 25, 2026.  We focus on the act of translation as a political act, with particular attention to the translation of Indigenous and quilombola knowledge and practice as found in the works of thinkers such as Ailton Krenak and Nêgo Bispo. We talk about translation’s importance in coalition building that is anti-capitalist and anti-fascist, and restores and nourishes affective affinities that link life and planetary forms in a kind of wholeness that defies the narrow, utilitarian logic of cosmophobic thought. We learn what it means to dwell in florestania, rather than in the City.Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, where they are Affiliated Faculty in Global and Comparative Literature and the Center for Latin American Studies. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they study how trans and queer cultural production negotiates and recasts the relationship between self-figuration and decolonial critique. Their first book, The Autotheory Effect: A Hemispheric Polemic, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press. They are co-editor of two volumes: Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2027). In addition to guest editing special issues of ASAP/Journal on autotheory (2021) and College Literature on trans literatures (2025), Brostoff has translated a range of literary nonfiction and critical theory from Spanish and Portuguese, including Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak's Ancestral Future (Polity Press, 2024) and the late Brazilian activist Nêgo Bispo’s The Earth Gives, The Earth Wants (Polity Press, 2026) in collaboration with Jamille Pinheiro Dias. Brostoff's scholarship and translations have appeared in Diacritics, Representations, TSQ, Synthesis, Critical Times, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere. Jamille Pinheiro Dias is Director of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Co-Director of the Environmental Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she is also a Senior Lecturer. She recently led a British Academy ODA Global Innovation Fellowship on environmental education and Indigenous film in Brazil (2025-2026). She is also an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, where she worked in the AHRC-funded Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America Project (2020-2022). She has held visiting professorships and research positions at Duke, Brown, Stanford, and the University of São Paulo. Her work focuses on environmental humanities, Indigenous arts and the politics of translation in Latin America, primarily in Brazil. She has published in Critique, Environmental Humanities, Radical History Review, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, among others.

Today is in a real honor to talk with Liza Black about her new book, How Settlers Get Away with Murder: The Killing of Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit People in the Americas.  Tragically, by now the epidemic of murders of Indigenous women has been well established and well-documented. What has not been brought to light are the longstanding and widespread efforts that allow these murders to go unpunished.  Driven by a commitment to tell the stories of the families of these women, Black not only delves into the often murky and incomplete archives of the state, but also assembles a new archive of indigenous voices, stories, photographs, images.  She shows how finding justice fell upon these relatives and friends and community members, and how they had to fight an uphill battle against the covering up and erasing of justice.  Critically, Black places each of these cases within a “macro-history” of settler colonial violence.These stories are not easy to listen to, but they deserve all of our attention, especially if we want to fight for those who are unable to speak for themselves.Liza Black is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and Associate Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Indiana University. Her work exposes how settler colonialism operates through cultural erasure, racialized labor systems, and state-sanctioned violence against Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people.As a 2024-25 Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard University, Black investigated how institutions normalize Indigenous disposability.Her second book, How Settlers Get Away with Murder (Beacon Press, 2026), demonstrates how North America's crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women reflects colonial systems functioning exactly as designed. Through forensic analysis of police records, court documents, and survivor testimonies, Black documents how settler law frames and harms Indigenous communities.Her first book, Picturing Indians (2020), uncovered how midcentury Hollywood exploited Native actors while systematically erasing their modernity. Drawing on payroll records and oral histories, she reveals how Indigenous performers negotiated the commodification of Native identity to assert agency within oppressive systems.The recipient of prestigious fellowships from Cherokee Nation, Harvard University, Cornell University, UCLA, and the Ford Foundation, Black's research bridges academic and public spheres. Her work has been featured in NPR, PBS, and El País, and she serves on numerous organizations advancing justice.

It’s a pleasure and an honor to talk with Manolo Callahan and Annie Paradise about their new book, Community Safety in the Fourth World War: Notes on Insurgent Conviviality.  This is a necessary book for everyone interested in avoiding the entrapments of the liberal state and seeking to learn and practice different ways of being in the world today.  Manolo and Annie insist on replacing the state’s priority of so-called “security,” which essentially stands for maintaining the order needed to maintain the Capitalist enterprise, with the idea of “safety,” which means more than protecting insurgent and subaltern communities, but also, and critically, helping them thrive, regenerate, and expand.To quote from Fred Moten and Stephano Harney’s Foreword to “Community Safety”“[Annie and Manolo] work the field, on and underground, of the damned, where movement for becomes movement with, when expression practices, not knowing ahead of time which studious derailment will be useful, not knowing before we get there how our involvement in struggle will feel, rather than asking ourselves about relationships… let’s wonder what we can do, let’s change the same, let’s surge convivially.”[During this episode we refer to these authors who have also appeared on Speaking Out of Place—check them out: Nick Mirzoeff and Priscilla Wathington; Silvia Federici; Isabella Fremeaux and Jay Jordan; Ida Susser; and Linda Quiquivix.]Manuel Callahan is the co-founder of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), a transterritorial research collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area with connections to struggles across Southern Mexico. Since 2003, he has facilitated the Universidad de la Tierra, Califas. For over three decades, he has been a primary activator of Acción Zapatista, including work with the Zapatista Autonomy Project. He is both a researcher and co-convener of the Counter Counterinsurgency Lab.Annie Paradise is a member of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), a transterritorial research collective, and a collaborator with the Universidad de la Tierra, Califas, an autonomous learning initiative, both based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a researcher and co-convener of the Counter Counterinsurgency Lab, and together with Manuel Callahan and others, facilitates Methodologies Against Forgetting and Oblivion (MAFO).   

Today I am excited to talk with Sonali Kolhatkar and Viet Thanh Nguyen about a new book edited by Sonali entitled Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism.The book is comprised of interviews Sonali conducted with activists, organizers, intellectuals and artists from a rich diversity of locations—from Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and other major cities, to small towns in Georgia, Maine, the Carolinas, and elsewhere.  We talk about the broad ideological formations that support State Terror and Fascism, as well as the ways people have wielded soft power with tactics and strategies such as mutual aid, Know Your Rights, power mapping, networking, and rapid response. Viet specifically talks about the power of counter-narratives that tap into radical imaginings and utopian thinking. We speak of the ways people from all walks of life have risen to the task of keeping each other safe.Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host, and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali which airs as a radio program on KPFK Pacifica Radio and dozens of other community radio stations around the U.S. and as a TV show on Free Speech TV, and a podcast on Spotify and iTunes.She is the author of Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories, 2026), Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible (Seven Stories, 2025), and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights, 2023). Her first book, co-authored with James Ingalls, is Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2006, Seven Stories).Sonali is Senior Correspondent and Writing Fellow of the Independent Media Institute‘s Economy for All project a monthly columnist at Truthout and also at OtherWords, Senior Correspondent for The Zero Hour, the founding Co-Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a US-based non-profit solidarity organization that funds the work of RAWA, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Justice Action Center.Her first novel, Queen of Aarohi, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2027. She also has won awards for her paintings and displayed her works at numerous exhibits and galleries. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He was a professor at the University of Southern California for many years, but stepped down from his professorship to become a Writer in Residence at USC. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and his most recent novel is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer. HBO turned The Sympathizer into a TV series in 2024, directed by Park Chan-wook. Nguyen’s last two books were Simone, a children’s book illustrated by Minnie Phan, and To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, from Harvard University Press in 2025.

The so-called “Cockroach” protests that erupted in India this past July grew quickly, gathering around them a number of different activist groups and individuals from various walks of life. These protests were met with tremendous state repression and censorship. Today we speak with Raaz and Sarthak, two student activists and organizers from Delhi, about the broad background to the struggles for education and a decent life, and how the fight has grown to encompass broad sectors of Indian society. Despite the attempts of the State and mainstream media to disappear these protests from the global mediascape, we learn how and why the protests and organizing has continued unabated, and what some of the key goals are.  Along with Raaz and Sarthak, we are joined once more by Suchitra Vijayan, director of the Polis Project and seasoned activist and journalist, who was also there as the protests unfolded.Raaz is a writer-researcher and independent journalist, currently pursuing their LL.B. from Delhi University, India. They are curious about different experiments in anti-fascist resistance, with a special interest in stories of criminalisation, gender, and people's movements. They are currently working with a small team to build a youtube studio / production house, @Krantikhana. They enjoy lofi music, indie animations, and Junji Ito novels.Sarthak is a non-binary filmmaker and journalist from Jamshedpur India. They seek experiential storytelling that is influenced by and derived from our zeitgeist. Their debut feature and core body of work lies at the locus of resistance, art, caste and language creation from the margins. Centering people and their politics, they aspire to re-discover fluidity in meaningful storytelling. They are currently working in an independent news organisation while building their own production house, @krantikhana.Suchitra Vijayan is an author, photographer, curator, and barrister. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of India’s Political Prisoners. A 2023 New York Foundation for the Arts Nonfiction Fellow.  She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, a New York-based global magazine of dissent. She is the Chair of the International Human Rights Committee at the New York City Bar and teaches at New York University and Columbia University. She previously worked with the UN War Crimes Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, co-founded the Settlement Legal Aid Project for Iraqi refugees in Cairo.

Today I have the honor and pleasure of speaking with Benjamin Moser about his new book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History. A book of immense historical and geographic reach, Anti-Zionism conveys its arguments through the lives of twelve Jewish anti-Zionists. From the 19th century Polish-Jewish rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares to the contemporary photographer and activist Nan Goldin, we learn how Jews have fought against the reduction of the traditional, expansive notion of Jewishness open to and in service to the world, to a form of narrow ethno-nationalism, closed off to all how do not subscribe to its genocidal settler colonial logic.  We learn how many of these figures foretold precisely the perpetual cycles of violence Zionism has unleashed. One of the reasons Moser wrote this book is contained in this statement. I offer it as a contribution to the movement by so many noble people who are working to construct an alternative vision of Jewish life, one that is free from racism, nationalism, and militarism. It is an attempt to say, especially to younger people, that we are not the first, and that we do not need to start afresh.Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and Sontag: Her Life and Work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters appeared in 2023. He completed Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Today I have the honor and privilege to speak with poet and physician Fady Joudah about his stunning new book-- Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza. Along with powerful and demanding texts, Exhibit G features a collection of photographs of Gaza presented in collaboration with Hani Almadhoun and the Gaza Soup Kitchen. Together, we are confronted with a demand to witness without translating the experience into what Joudah calls “Palestine in English.” The totality of the experience is at once devastating, horrifying, but also at times beautiful and literally beyond words. Along with reading portions of the essays and poems, Fady Joudah offers his usual probing readings of Palestinian history, culture, literature, and social life. No other document so forcefully and comprehensively expresses this genocide.Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He was educated at the University of Georgia, the Medical College of Georgia, and the University of Texas Health Sciences in Houston. In 2002 and 2005 he worked with Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and Sudan, respectively.Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, chosen by Louise Glück. Joudah followed his second book of poetry, Alight (2013) with Textu (2014), a collection of poems written on a cell phone wherein each piece is exactly 160 characters long. His fourth collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018).  In 2014, Joudah was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. As critic Charles Bainbridge observed in a 2008 Guardian review of The Earth in the Attic, “Joudah’s poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”Joudah translated  several collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work in The Butterfly’s Burden (2006), which won the Banipal prize from the UK and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and in If I Were Another, which won a PEN USA award in 2010. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser's Petra: The Concealed Rose and A Map of Signs and Scents.Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine.   

Today it’s a special pleasure to welcome Adrian Daub back to Speaking Out of Place to discuss his new book, “What Tech Calls Governing.” This is a devastatingly brilliant and immensely witty critique of Silicon Valley “disruptors” and the fragile, clueless egos of (currently) vastly wealthy people (mostly all men) and both their insinuation into our government and their detachment from reality. Among other things we talk about their aversion to caring about anything but themselves. We end with a conversation about utopias that are already here for us, once we leave off any fascination with a world where, as Daub says, “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, but for some inexplicable reason, your dishwasher can communicate with your car.” Adrian Daub is an academic and writer living in San Francisco. He is the author of What Tech Calls Thinking, The Cancel Culture Panic, What Tech Calls Governing, and many other books. Together with Moira Donegan he hosts the podcast In Bed with the Right, which focuses on rightwing conceptions of gender and sexuality. His next book will be Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now.