A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Interrogates the spatial dimensions of state power. Contributions analyze the material practices and modes of knowledge particular to anti-statist revolt, citizenship, bordering, interstate conflict, nationalism, political representation, segregation, sovereignty, surveillance, and warcraft among other areas. Especially attentive to demands for alternative forms of political life outside formal state channels.
As the Israeli attack on Gaza intensified in July 2014, a large poster made an appearance in front of some hotels in Mumbai that depicted icons of prominent U.S. products and read, “Indian Hoteliers boycott Israeli and U.S. products.” Boycott has a long history and political resonance in India dating back to anti-colonial struggles from the early 20th century and also from the anti-apartheid movement when India boycotted South Africa. This most recent boycott, however, does not have the same tenor or carry the same moral or ethical weight.
I discuss here the spatiality of migrant labor flows and control that underpin capitalist labor exploitation and led to the riot in Singapore, and conclude with a short reflection on the question of spatial justice in the Asian global city.
As if on cue, the sun powered through the afternoon rainclouds. The camera crew quickly set up their equipment on the narrow footbridge. The community leader they were interviewing – a Rastafarian involved in a variety of disaster management and development activities in Trinityville, Jamaica – directed them to the best angle to capture a particularly hazardous bend in a river. With the perfect perspective set, the interview commenced.
It is day twenty-four of Israel’s latest military assault on Gaza. At the time of this writing, the Palestinian death toll exceeds 1,300 with casualties mounting by the hour. As per the most recent statistics from the United Nations, more than 250,000 residents have been internally displaced, many made refugees again, and much of Gaza’s urban and civilian infrastructure lies in ruins.
Attending to the experiences of Hawai‘i’s houseless, I unpack the meanings and practices of organized abandonment while proposing that some face structural neglect by “living with abandon.” I argue that the rupturing of life-giving relations entwined with particular places serve as a foundation of organized abandonment.
In reflecting on the current Cuban economic, social and humanitarian crisis, I aim at catching the pulse of the moment to shift the crisis-based discourse to one based on pressure. I focus on two types of pressure – air and blood – to think through the pulse of the post-COVID Cuban crisis.
This article argues that the mobility of animal bodies is deployed to produce a distinctive form of territorial imagination in China, one which foregrounds the friction of terrain at certain sites, and conjures up state fantasies of interspecies relations as/and interethnic friendship. While much recent scholarly literature focusses on the collocation of infrastructure and state power, this article calls for attention to the ways in which states can also mobilize representations of selected sites of roadlessness, and concomitant animal-based mobilities.
Drawing from monster theory, the article reflects on the trans-corporeal body burdening of black plastic bags and the black hands, black bodies, black markets, and black, corrupt, illicit actions with whom and which they are associated. Reconceptualising the (black) single-use plastic bag as an agape, plastic monster that defines, patrols, and transgresses cultural/economic boundaries, this article calls for making explicit the vermicular activities within economic marginalisation and distinguishing them from the discursively constructed amorphous, tentacled mass.
Through a contemporary history of social conflicts surrounding the Corredor, I demonstrate how corporate and State actors work together to make corporations appear as if they were independent from the social contexts in which they operate and therefore free from responsibility for the harms they cause. Following Timothy Mitchell, I call this the “corporate effect.”