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Imperial botany/biopolitics in Latin America and racial hierarchy among Linnaeus and Darwin: 'Poor Chinese,' 'utter savages,' and body-as-Empire

(Originally posted elsewhere on 28 May 2020.) Three excerpts, four scholars. In conversation! We’re looking at highly-influential European celebrity naturalists and their invocations of race/racial hierarchy (whether personally/explicitly or through their co-opting by their contemporaries). Subscribe Including: Linnaeus’s mention of the “Poor Chinese” and

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GIRLgamesh and tigers: Ancient analogues and European imaginaries of Orientalized cats

(Originally posted elsewhere on 5 November 2025.) Minor nonsense post. Fun analogues. Framing joke: Subscribe Gilgamesh vs. two lions in Mesopotamia. GIRL(?)gamesh vs. two tigers in the Indus Valley. As seen here. 2600 BC at Sumer (“masculine” Gilgamesh figure wrestling two lions): From relatively far away in the Indus

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Narratives of Atlantic piracy and crises of imperial legitimacy (part 3 of 3): Slavery, Black rebellion, and the 'Black Pacific'

(Originally posted elsewhere on….. While Alexandra Ganser’s book examines the elevation of the image of pirates and Black rebels in US literature/popular print press after the 1830s in the midst of abolition discourse, Ganser also elsewhere (an article in Atlantic Studies from 2018) on Melville’s "Benito

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Narratives of Atlantic piracy and crises of imperial legitimacy (part 2 of 3): US 'maritime nationalism,' the 'recuperated revolutionary' image, and Barbary 'monstrosity,' 1800-1850

(Originally posted elsewhere on 18 February 2022.) Detail (public domain image) of the title page of Murray, Fanny Campbell: the female pirate captain (F. Gleason, 1845). Excerpt 1: Notably, [Thomas] Jefferson’s distinctions between the United States and Britain in the Declaration of Independence draft draws on the cultural difference

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Narratives of Atlantic piracy and crises of imperial legitimacy (part 1 of 3): Frontiers, 'domesticating the outlaw,' and 'rebels in service of empire'

(Originally posted elsewhere 22 March 2022.) Detail of public domain image, a late 1720s/early 1730s map of the Caribbean (just after the “golden age of piracy”) by artist Herman Moll, “A Map of the West-Indies & c. Mexico or New Spain: Also ye Trade Winds, and ye Several

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The Empire imagines a globe: Vision, maps, and aerial photography in US perceptions of a global totality/possession, from 1900 to 1961

(Originally posted elsewhere 2021 and 2023. Compiled together and edited 18 November 2024.) Excerpt 1: By the dawn of a century christened as both the American and the geographic century, [...] European explorers and cartographers actively filled the last [apparently] remaining terrae incognitae [on their maps and globes] [...] and excited economic

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Ramirez D'Oleo on 'Blackness' and 'mischief'; Maynard on 'care work' as 'rehearsal'; Kanngieser on 'modes of survival'

(Originally posted elsewhere on 2 January 2024.) [D]eviance and mischief. [...] [F]urtive [...]. [O]ther poetically inspiring words: secretive, surreptitious, clandestine, covert, conspiratorial, oblique [...]. We must fold these small acts of love and creativity and play (and laughter and irreverence and whimsy) into other resistant projects against white supremacy [...]. In

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Hanford toxicity, Indigenous communities, and legacies of extraction in the in the inland Pacific Northwest

(Originally posted elsewhere on 13 May 2020.) Hanford has been in the news in The Spokesman-Review (inland Northwest, based in Spokane). Subscribe So I wanted to make the context more animate by considering some actual photos/maps of the site which I’ve appended here alongside excerpts from: Anita

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Escobar's hippos, Andean landscapes, and the meaning of 'natural'/'invasive' in the Anthropocene: Responding to message about Colombia

(Originally posted elsewhere on 16 January 2021.) Yes, Escobar’s hippos. I’ve followed the story for a long time and I have many thoughts about these hippos. Here are some: -- This of course also reminds me of Louisiana federal Congressman Robert Broussard’s notorious Hippo Bill (from 1910) and

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Oceanian literature, the imaginary of the 'empty space' of Pacific, and retorts to US (nuclear) imperialism

(Originally posted elsewhere on 18 January 2021.) While reading some Oceanian/Pacific fiction, I’d gone and checked out Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poetry. Subscribe Here, I wanted to contextualize the significance by sharing an excerpt scholar of literature/English, Michelle Keown, who addresses legacies of US/nuclear imperialism, environmental

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'Believe in the border' and 'making modernity' through 'mundane performance of power' in French Algeria: Brock Cutler's 'ecologies of imperialism' and a review

(Originally post elsewhere on 13 September 2023.) First, another scholars’ review (from H-Net/H-Environment) of Brock Cutler’s book, Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). Then, an excerpt from one of Cutler’s articles, “Believe in the Border, or, How to Make Modernity in

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Some of the more egregious Anglosphere imperial scientists' descriptions of racialized women as 'murderous' plants and insects, 18th-19th centuries

(Originally posted elsewhere on 9 January 2021.) Scientists and naturalists in Britain and the US, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sometimes seemed to wake up, roll out of bed, and think: “Okay, time to describe women, non-white people, and colonial subjects as carnivorous plants and pestilent insects in