Excerpt: Contemporary Afro- and Indo-Guyanese claims to sovereignty are based on [an] intimate historical labour relationship with the land, but that relationship is so recent in epochal time that the new Guyanese rulers must invoke continuity with the effaced indigenous “Amerindian” presence to establish legitimacy while simultaneously denying the indigenous inhabitants their land rights and very identities.

Excerpt: Of all the critical and theoretical keywords and practices that have devolved from poststructuralism — decentering, deconstructing, dismantling, disrupting, disturbing, problematizing, resisting, troubling, undoing, and others — at least in Canada at the present time the most important such keyword might be “unsettling,” both in the sense of creating a disturbance within the hegemony of the moment but also in the more direct and applied sense of un-settling settlement. 

Abstract: This article engages with the views of prominent leaders from the First Intifada to evaluate the possibility of a Palestinian uprising under existing circumstances. It provides insight into the past and present to establish a basis for contemporary struggle. In acknowledging the fragmentation of Palestinian land and population, the article argues that many of the features that made popular struggle possible during the First Intifada are now clearly absent, requiring a new praxis of resistance.

In the Guardian Afua Hirsch concludes that ‘Whenever Trump says ‘infested’, we know he’s talking about people of colour‘. She is spot on, but there’s more than racism. Settler colonialism is a mode of domination that reproduces a specific sociopolitical body in the place of another. Unwanted and uncontrolled reproduction is the end of settler colonialism. Like an infection (the terms share the same etymology), an infestation’s primary characteristic is an ability to reproduce. That’s when the settler-colonial mind flips out.

Abstract: This paper examines the historical processes that transformed tar sands bitumen in the Athabasca river basin into a natural resource of Canada. The discourse of the resource was first applied to bitumen during the second half of the nineteenth century as the settler colonial state dispatched geologists into the region to quantify, calculate, and measure its properties, and to speculate upon its potential economic applications. The re-storying of bitumen as a natural resource fostered a sense of resource nationalism among citizens of this newly formed state, who projected their fantasies of a settler colonial future upon the stored potentialities that the resource offered. In turn, this desire to secure resources on behalf of the Canadian nation served to consolidate the state’s incursion into the Athabasca, enabling the spatial reorganization of the region in accordance with the settler resource imaginary. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, I suggest that we can think about this relationship between settler colonialism and the resource as a “resource desiring machine,” where both the subject and the object of desire are co-produced through the relationship of desire itself. Moreover, I argue that this can help us to rethink the relationship between resources and violence. Rather than asking how and when resources cause violence, I argue that violence is inherent to the very category of resource. Violence is the constitutive moment of resource-making, and sustaining the resource imaginary relies on the ongoing violence (threatened or actual) of political and economic institutions such as private property and the state.

Abstract: Katherine McKittrick famously wrote in Demonic Grounds that “black lives are necessarily geographic, but also struggle with discourses that erase and despatialize their sense of place” (McKittrick, 2006, p. xiii). From analyses of diaspora to the plantation, from studies of urban segregation to anticolonial circuits of resistance, Black thought has long been concerned with questions of space, place, and power. Yet these interventions, which span centuries and continents, have not always been recognized as “properly” geographical and have thus been systematically excluded from the formal canon of disciplinary geography. Within the last five years, however, Black Geographies as a field of inquiry has gained increasing institutional recognition—thanks to the tireless labor of Black scholars to carve out spaces for their work within the discipline. This article reflects on the state of the field of Black Geographies, with an emphasis on the radically interdisciplinary interventions this body of scholarship has made into the mainstream of disciplinary geography. I review some of the most prominent thematic areas within Black Geographies, including space‐making and the Black geographic imagination; racial capitalism; cities, policing, and carceral geographies; and racism and plantation futures. I conclude with a consideration of avenues for future research, including the need for more studies that provincialize North America and connect with Latinx and Native/Indigenous geographies.

Excerpt: Must a non-US Western always be a pastiche of a US Western to be classified as a Western? Can a non-US Western be set outside of North America and still be called a Western? These are the challenging questions that come to mind when thinking about Argentina’s well-developed frontier mythology.

Excerpt: The slowest of the art forms, and one that generally starts with considering local context, community connections and subtle elements like site lines, is spun into a whole new dimension when architecture needs to consider the world’s oldest living culture, clan, inter-family and moiety relationships, and the ancient insider knowledge of songlines.

Description: If city life is a “being together of strangers,” what forms of being together should we strive for in cities with ethnic and racial diversity? Everyday Equalities seeks evidence of progressive political alternatives to racialized inequality that are emerging from everyday encounters in Los Angeles, Melbourne, Sydney, and Toronto—settler colonial cities that, established through efforts to dispossess and eliminate indigenous societies, have been destinations for waves of immigrants from across the globe ever since.

Everyday Equalities finds such alternatives being developed as people encounter one another in the process of making a home, earning a living, moving around the city, and forming collective actions or communities. Here four leading scholars in critical urban geography come together to deliver a powerful and cohesive message about the meaning of equality in contemporary cities. Drawing on both theoretical reflection and urban ethnographic research, they offer the formulation “being together in difference as equals” as a normative frame to reimagine the meaning and pursuit of equality in today’s urban multicultures.

As the examples in Everyday Equalities indicate, much emotional labor, combined with a willingness to learn from each other, negotiate across differences, and agitate for change goes into constructing environments that foster being together in difference as equals. Importantly, the authors argue, a commitment to equality is not only a hope for a future city but also a way of being together in the present.

Abstract: While Australian political studies often appears to have neglected engagements with Indigenous peoples and politics, we argue this is not a simple question of omission. In fact, the discipline is deeply implicated in imperial knowledge production and the authorisation of racialised colonial governance. As non-Indigenous scholars working within Australian political studies, in this paper we reflect on our own discipline in light of several decades of critical scholarship, identifying the production of disciplinary innocence through a theoretical and institutional analysis of Australian political studies knowledge practices. We explore this production via canonical knowledges, institutional processes that contain Indigenous people and knowledge to subjects of policy, and the operation of disciplinary divisions which neutralise scholarship on policy and political institutions.