Description: In The Age of the Borderlands, acclaimed historian Andrew C. Isenberg offers a new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that […]

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Abstract: This interview with Noura Erakat was done by John Reynolds in September 2022. We discuss the defining features of settler colonialism, how it is distinguished from other forms of colonialism, and the nature of its relationship with international law. The interview also addresses questions of knowledge production: how the field of settler colonial studies […]

Abstract: This article examines the constitution of a settler colony in Liberia, along with its consolidation of modern governmental power, through a techno-political account of debt, rubber and the corporation. Although settlers, paradoxically, received very little of the money loaned to them by international finance capital, their indebtedness was crucially productive. Disassembling the workings of ‘debt’ […]

Abstract: In this article, we examine how fire—a triangle of heat, fuel and oxygen—functions as a settler colonial tool of destruction closely linked to techniques of elimination and replacement. In Palestine, we conceptualise fire as part of a broader set of pyrotechniques—elemental practices that devastate more than bodies and infrastructures by targeting and eroding the […]

Abstract: This paper develops a concept, ‘the tree farm pastoral,’ that describes the ability to perceive beauty in the midst of destruction and dispossession through a particular framing of the extraction of wood and the cultivation of crops. The tree farm pastoral is an affective orientation marked by a series of profound transformations in the […]

Abstract: This article, written by two Dalit scholars from different religions and nationalities, reflects on the contours of Dalitness as an ethic and worldview. Drawing on Dalit and Black writers, they put forward the praxis of Dalitness as ‘rooted in the soil’ to present Dalitness as negotiated, as lived, and dreamt rather than as always […]

Abstract: Although Javier Milei’s administration has only just begun, some of its statements and initiatives already indicate policies that threaten the lives and rights of indigenous peoples. Deeply embedded libertarian principles are in clear conflict with key constitutional mandates regarding indigenous policy. Moreover, libertarian modes of governance amplify entrenched narratives of Argentina’s formation of alterity, […]

Abstract: The artistic production of Walt Kuhn, as well as the watershed exhibition he helped organize—the Armory Show of 1913—were shaped by the legacies of United States colonialism. This essay substantiates this claim by positioning the Armory Show’s pine tree emblem as well as Kuhn’s own work in relation to deeper iconographic histories and interpreting […]

Abstract: Racially disproportionate incarceration, or over-incarceration, of Indigenous people is a significant issue in the US. Overincarceration of Indigenous people in the US is a critical and deep-rooted social issue. Racialized structural inequalities in general are theorized to underpin racialized inequalities in carceral system capture (arrest and incarceration) and outcomes including sentence length, monetary penalties, […]