In 2017, activist-scholar Robyn Maynard published her groundbreaking study, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.  Today, I have the privilege of talking with her about the second edition of this study, which has just been published by Duke University Press. Robyn tells us what has happened since 2017 that compelled her to revise the book and add important new materials to address the challenges of the present. At the core of this new edition is a powerful argument against reform and for abolition—Maynard details the numerous failures of police reform, and explains why precious time, resources, and lives have been spent trying to bring about authentic change via reform.  Her vision for abolition is bold, and expansive, reaching beyond Canada to examine both transnational apparatuses of surveillance, policing, and punishment, and vital global forms of resistance and solidarity.

Robyn Maynard is an author and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Her writing on borders, policing, abolition and Black feminism is taught widely in universities across Canada, the United States and Europe.

The first edition of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, published in 2017, is a national bestseller, designated as one of the “best 100 books of 2017” by the Hill Times, listed in The Walrus‘s “best books of 2018,” shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award, the Concordia University First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction, and the winner of the 2017 Errol Sharpe Book Prize. In 2018 the book was published in French, titled NoirEs sous surveillance. Esclavage, répression et violence d’État au Canada, and won the 2019 Prix de libraires. Her second book, Rehearsals for Living, co-authored with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, is a Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and CBC national bestseller and was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award for literary non-fiction, a Toronto Heritage Award, and designated one of CBC’s “best Canadian non-fiction books of 2022” and the “best 100 books of 2022” by the Hill Times. Other awards include “2018 Author of the Year” from Montreal’s Black History Month and the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQI* Emerging Writers. Her public scholarship is available at http://www.robynmaynard.com

How do not only monuments, but also the very idea of monumentality, serve to mystify and perpetuate beliefs that maintain social orders that deserve to be strenuously re-evaluated? Archaeologist and anthropologist Dan Hicks traces the development of a particularly virulent strain of monument-worship, that which emerges out of what he calls “militarist realism,” which harnesses technologies of war, particularly colonial, white supremacist war, to build institutions, disciplines, museums in its image in order to permanently maintain a border between those deemed human subjects and the object-worlds of the non-human—which includes racial others. Rather than grant the past immunity, Hicks argues that we need to decide for ourselves what we chose to remember, and what deserves to be forgotten.

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford University, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College. He has written widely on art, heritage, museums, colonialism, and the material culture of the recent past and the near-present. Dan’s books include The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution (Pluto 2020) and Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting (Hutchinson Heinemann 2025). Bluesky/Insta: @ProfDanHicks

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.

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with scholar-activists Naomi Paik and Ashley Dawson about the close connection between abolition and environmental activism from below. How are the twin projects raising profound questions about borders, carcerality, enclosures, and the separation of humans from each other and all other forms of life, including supposedly “inanimate” objects?  How can we create “sanctuary for all” in a radical rethinking of notions like “the commons”?

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Recently published books of his focus on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, and include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). Dawson is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket) and the co-editor of Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2023). For the past 20 years Ashley has been engaged in public higher education as our nation’s largest urban university CUNY helps transform the lives of huge numbers of students from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds.  Ashley believes deeply in the mission of public institutions such as CUNY to provide a quality education to such students and his teaching and pedagogy philosophy has been shaped by this commitment

Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length project, “Sanctuary for All,” calls for the most capacious conception of sanctuary that brings together migrant and environmental justice. A member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, she has co-edited four special issues of the journal—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020), and “Alternatives to the Anthropocene” with Ashley Dawson (Winter 2023). She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books alongside Cat Ramirez, as well as “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog of the Smithsonian Institution with Sam Vong. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a member of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, UIC. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen about their new book, The Black Antifascist Tradition, which uses a vast set of archival materials to show how Black intellectuals and activists regarded anti-Black racism as inseparable from fascism. This is brought out vividly in the ways the law was constructed, labor was extracted, culture oppressed, and lives curtailed.

Struggles for Black liberation are therefore connected across national boundaries, just as fascist and racist laws and practices are shared by oppressive regimes globally. Hope and Mullen show how these cross currents work in examples like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War, and the momentous 1951 document, “We Charge Genocide,” that linked fascism in the US to violations of international humanitarian law. Ultimately, we talk about how peoples’ movements must always acknowledge how racism and fascism are baked into the law, and unite in world-making projects that lead to liberation for all peoples.

Dr. Jeanelle K. Hope is the Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University. She is a native of Oakland, California and a scholar of Black political thought, culture, and social movements. Dr. Hope is the co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. Her research has been published in several academic journals including The American Studies Journal, Amerasia, View, and Black Camera, and her public scholarship has been featured in Voices of River City, Essence, and the African American Policy Forum.

Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue.  He is co-author with Jeanelle Hope of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-lynching to Abolition.  He is also author of James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press) and We Charge Genocide!: American Fascism and the Rule of Law (forthcoming September Fordham University Press).  He is a member of the organizing collective for USACBI (United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).

Today, on Speaking Out of Place, we are joined by eminent political theorists Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra  to talk about their thesis of a global war regime and its relationship with capitalist governments, a significant challenge to dominant conceptualizations of war, and its relationship with the international order.

We discuss colonial continuities, historical transformations, and global Palestine movements against the Gaza genocide as an inspiration for non-nationalist, internationalist resistance futures.

Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University.  He is co-author of several books with Antonio Negri, including Empire.  His most recent books are The Subversive Seventies and (with Sandro Mezzadra) Bolivia Beyond the Impasse.  Together Sandro and Michael host The Social Movements Lab.

Sandro Mezzadra teaches Political theory at the University of Bologna (Department of Arts). His work centers on borders, migration, global processes, and contemporary capitalism. For many years now, he has been part of autonomist movements as an activist and he participates in the further development of Italian autonomist Marxism. Among his books in English, In the Marxian Workshops. Producing Subjects, London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013), The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019), and The Rest and the West. Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (forthcoming from Verso, 2024).