This teach-in places the invasion of Caracas and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by U.S. forces in the historical context of oil and gas operations in the Americas. The return of “oil wars” to the Americas is not new, but reflects more than a century of conflicts between labor and capital, imperialism, and socialism in the Greater Caribbean. Through collective study, participants will examine the political economy of oil and gas and traditions of direct democracy and workers’ self-management in the Caribbean.
Ryan Cecil Jobson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. His first book, The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago, was published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2024. He is currently at work on two subsequent manuscripts, an intellectual biography of the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, entitled C.L.R. James and the Question of Power, and a collection of essays on anthropological theory and method in an era of climate extinction. Jobson serves on the editorial committee of Small Axe and as coeditor-in-chief of Transforming Anthropology.