Settler slips: Sarah Elizabeth Vaughn, ‘Unavoidable Slips: Settler Colonialism and Terra Nullius in the Wake of Climate Adaptation’, Critical Inquiry, 50, 3, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler slips: Sarah Elizabeth Vaughn, ‘Unavoidable Slips: Settler Colonialism and Terra Nullius in the Wake of Climate Adaptation’, Critical Inquiry, 50, 3, 2024

02Mar24

Abstract: This article focuses on Guyanese efforts in the postcolonial present to address environmental issues that have become increasingly complex in the face of an awareness of climate change. It opens with an account of how the preservation of Indigenous forests contributes to international efforts to reduce carbon, while making visible the instability that the discovery of oil and gas reserves in the seabed might portend for the Guyanese economy. Specifically, the article examines how engineers have historically confronted settler-colonial discourses about terra nullius unfold as they invest in sea defense. In doing so, the article foregrounds what engineers call slips—the slow or sudden displacement of a sea defense’s structural foundation. Slips are phenomena of energy conversion between land and sea. Rather than arguing for the claims of the pre-Anthropocene earth, the article suggests how many factors are in play in developing policy in the present, in an era of heightened awareness of the different forces in a changing climate.

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