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.
From late 2015 through early 2016, a new vector-borne epidemic swept across the Americas, the Pacific, and much of Southeast Asia, bringing new attention to questions of connection across different spaces, species, and sociopolitical orders. Like both dengue and West Nile, Zika virus is passed from person to person by mosquitoes, primarily Aedes aegypti.
On July 25th, 2017, a Chinese “incursion” into a Himalayan pasture land called Barahoti was widely reported by the Indian media.[1] Coming in the wake of a tense Himalayan border fracas to the east of Barahoti in a place called Doklam that is located at the tri-junction of India, China, and Bhutan, the claims of yet another territorial breach provoked an uproar in India’s increasingly hyper-nationalistic news media.
On the 7th of October 2018, without warning, a sinkhole opened under a busy footpath in Dazhou City in south-west China. Four people fell in and were killed, only two bodies were retrieved. Three weeks later, CCTV footage in south-east Turkey captured an image of two women falling into a sinkhole that opened underneath them. Miraculously, they both survived without any serious injuries.
One winter morning red dust spiraled from the surface of a broken road. It rapidly gathered volume as a convoy of border-patrol jeeps whizzed past India’s newly constructed border wall with Bangladesh. This infrastructure encloses significant stretches of the 2545-mile-long India-Bangladesh border, South Asia’s longest international boundary. Unlike the rusty fences and fence-like structures that had earlier divided this landscape, the new barrier was distinguished by furiously coiled barbed wires that were placed between angular iron frames.
Despite enfolding several Indian battalions within its hills, the border town of Uri had none of the buzz that I imagined would characterize the “garrison-entrepot” (Roitman 1998). Until the recent release of a Bollywood military-action film titled Uri:The Surgical Strike, the name Uri did not command the kind of patriotic charge associated with places like Kargil or Siachen, symbols of heroic confrontation with Pakistan in the war-map of Kashmir.
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.”