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Newsletter

On the 'durability of the plantation' and 'non-event of emancipation': Several scholars on post-1860s labor, chain-gangs, and convict colonies

(Originally posted elsewhere 2023.) Excerpt 1: In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain [...]. Slavery and industrialization were tied by

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On imperial/environmental histories of refrigeration and circulation: Hi'ilei Julia Hobart on Hawaiian ice and Karen Morin on railway cattle cars

(Originally posted elsewhere on 26 June 2025.) Pondering some stuff on the birth/ascent of refrigeration and its importance in facilitating the circulation of material goods for corporations. (Just woke up and have to go straight to work [on what was supposed to be my one day off], so couldn&

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History of music and race/Blackness in the Caribbean/LatAm: Some recently-published books

(Originally posted elsewhere on 21 July 2022.) Just going through some recent notes. Hope these might be interesting to you: Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (Larisa Kingston Mann, 2022) Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Funk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico (Maurice Rafael

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The greenwashing of tree plantations: Compilation of critiques of 'forest restoration' in Chile, Ireland, India, and beyond

(Originally posted elsewhere December 2020. Edited, augmented, and re-posted elsewhere on 16 August 2023.) Despite its green image, Ireland has surprisingly little forest. [...] [M]ore than 80% of the island of Ireland was [once] covered in trees. [...] [O]f that 11% of the Republic of Ireland that is [now]

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Indigenous Amazonia and 'the politics of erasure': Paulo Tavares on the Brazilian state production of 'voids'

(Originally posted elsewhere on 11 June 2019.) Two pieces from Paulo Tavares—one from an essay in Intercalations (2017), the other from an essay in the inimitable e-flux (2016). Subscribe Thought they worked well side-by-side. — Excerpt 1: In colonial and modern imaginaries, the Indigenous peoples of Amazonia

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Jerboa and Aldebaran: Toxicity, French colonialism in Polynesia and Algeria, and the power of stealing a (Indigenous) names

(Originally posted elsewhere on 18 July 2020.) “Jerboa” The quaint rodent, the unique and lovable creature. Famous for its amusing and impressive skill at leaping and bouncing. An iconic species of the deserts of North Africa. The first French nuclear bomb in the Sahara: Named after the jerboa. France, in

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Urban ruination, "master narratives of history," and counter-memories from those 'banished to the periphery': Tim Edensor's work (for Halloween!)

(Originally posted elsewhere on 30 October 2023.) Two excerpts. Subscribe Fun. Like a ghost (on-brand for Halloween), I’ll keep my voice to myself (or… wait, by presenting them as such, with selective excerpts, is my voice quite present if only more subtle through editorial choices? Very ghostly). — Excerpt

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Iyko Day's work: 'Colonial unknowing,' 'alien capital,' and entanglements of Hiroshima, New Mexico, and the Congo

(Originally posted elsewhere on 2 April 2020.) Three snippets from reviews/discussions of Iyko Day’s work. She is author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016). In 2019, Day gave a presentation at University of Connecticut—”Settler Colonialism’s Hirsohima”

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Haiti, US health insurance, and British-Caribbean abolition: Paying for your own murder through debt

(Originally posted elsewhere on 23 May 2023.) Compilation. Again. Sorry. Guess the theme. — Excerpt 1: [S]low death occurs not within the time scale of the crisis, not of the event [or singular moment] [...], but in “a zone of temporality ... of ongoingness, getting by, and living on, where the structural

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When we discuss extinct tigers do we also discuss the origins of modern apples?: An entangled Central Asian environmental history

(Originally published elsewhere on 24 July 2020.) Riffing on ongoing fixation on Caspian tigers: When I see talk of “apples,” I do not often see mention of “tigers.” Subscribe An apparent most-likely origin of the domesticated apple, the “apple forests” of the Tian Shan foothills (where this fruit is

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Haunting in postcolonial Caribbean literature: Ghosts of the plantation, political ecology of King Sugar, and enchantment of capitalsit modernity in Jamaica, Dominica, and Guyana

(Originally posted elsewhere on 17 August 2020.) A compilation of two scholars, side-by-side. Each writes on ghosts/haunting/spectral presence in twentieth-century and contemporary literature of the Greater Caribbean, in fiction which grapples with (post/neo)colonial legacies. — Excerpt 1: [In Mittelholzer’s novel] the reworking of

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The 'Great Beast' (a tapir), Early Modern commodification, and circulation of 'wondrous' knowledge about Latin American animals

(Originally posted elsewhere on 5 February 2024.) Thinking about “the Great Beast”. Subscribe Thinking about the superlatively unique and loveable creature, the tapir. Thinking about European colonial agents being perplexed and bedazzled upon first encountering the “forest cow” and the “elephant of the New World”. Thinking about how an incredible