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.
The Birth of Territory traces how the relations between land and power have been understood in a very wide range of texts from the period of classical Greece to seventeenth-century western Europe. For each period, Elden asks if it is meaningful to speak of writers as using a concept resembling the modern understanding of territory, that is of a bounded space as the object of rule.
Five days after Stuart Hall died, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed accusing academics of self-inflicted public irrelevance. That same day, Larry Grossberg, a student of Hall’s, published an essay reflecting on his former teacher’s intellectual influence around the world. Grossberg ended his tribute with the line: “It is a time to remember that ideas matter as we try to change the world, and that bad stories, make bad politics.”
The translation into English of Henri Lefebvre’s essay, ‘Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis’, prompts an opportunity to pose afresh some questions about the intersection of politics and space, the state organisation of space, and the production of space. While the history of capitalism is intrinsically linked to how the modern state organises space — to engender social relations in space and bind itself to space — the attention to these concerns has been dawdling in historical sociology.
Henri Lefebvre’s “Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis” is noteworthy because it rearticulates various problems Lefebvre tackled in the decades before 1989. One of his last texts, the article certainly does, as David Wachsmuth and Neil Brenner point out, serve as an intriguing link to current debates on comparative urbanization. However, the article also reminds us how Lefebvre’s work is punctuated with missed opportunities.
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.”