« The race of settlers: Nancy Huayan Carranza, ‘Problematizing the Multiracial Promised Land: Multiracial Settler Belonging in Hawaiʻi in the Asian American Literary Imagination’, MELUS, 2025, #mlaf012
Planning the settler unplanning: Janice Barry, ‘The ongoing unsettlement of planning thought: The difference that settler-colonial and critical Indigenous theory make’, in Philip Allmendinger, Mark Tewdwr-Jones, Matthew Wargent, Critical Planning Futures New Directions in Planning Theory, Routledge, 2025 »

Interstellar colonialism starts here: Luis Hernan, ‘Reaching for the Stars: Boca Chica and Interstellar Colonialism’, in Gihan Karunaratne (ed.), Displaced Urbanism, Routledge, 2025

27May25

Abstract: In this article, I ask whose bodies are disciplined, silenced and displaced to make way for the interplanetary utopia of Starbase, the launchpad of SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas. Its location in the borderlands speaks of a troubled legacy which mobilises the home as a symbolic ordering of bodies that excludes the racial other. Against the mythologising of Starbase, and its symbolic and material destruction of the past of the site, I write Boca Chica through a description of Elon Musk’s home at the site, suggesting its interior as a performance of geek cultures and hegemonic masculinities. It is this performance, I argue, that shows the continuities of a historical settler-colonial project on the site, starting with the establishment of Clarkesville shortly after the Mexican-American war, with modern colonialism embedded in the techno-utopias of Silicon Valley.


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