#borders boundaries hinterlands frontiers etc

[fatehbaz]

[D]ebt and indebtedness [...] produc[e] forms of spatial enclosure [imprisonment] that do not rely on the spectacular [singular moments of blatant literal physical violence] but are, rather, achieved through temporal openings and foreclosures. To be clear, this frame does not obscure the many forms of carceral enclosure [...]: the prison, the checkpoint, the security wall. Historically, enclosure is understood as the privatization of land. But Wang extends the concept of enclosure to encompass time. Wang demonstrates that [...] mobility is policed through [...] an apparatus of punishment that solicits time as the form of spatial enclosure. [...]

[D]ebilitating infrastructures turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies. [...] [C]heckpoints [...]; administrative bureaucratic apparatuses that stall and foreclose travel, mobility for work, [...] the capacity to move and change residences - baroque processes to apply for permits to travel [...], absence of public services such as postal delivery [...]; and finally [...] denial of resolution, suspension in the space of the indefinite [...]. In fact, slow death itself is literalized as the slowing down of life [...]. [Land] itself becomes simultaneously bigger - because it takes so long to get anywhere - and smaller, as transit becomes arduous [...] where it is so difficult to travel between areas without permits and identifications. Movement is suffocated. Distance is stretched and manipulated to create an entire population with mobility impairments. And yet space is shrunken, as people are held in place, rarely able to move far. [...]

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Time itself is held hostage.

This is the slow aspect of slow death: slow death can entail a really slow life, too, a life that demands constant calibration of different speeds and the relation of speed to space. [...]

The suspended state of the indefinite, of waiting and waiting (it) out, wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc. [...]

Time thus is the meter of power; it is one form that physical enclosure takes on. The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall “lack of jurisdiction over the function of one’s own senses” (Schuller 2018: 74) endemic to the operation of colonial rule [...]. [T]his process entails several modes of temporal differentiation: withholding futurity, making impossible anything but a slowed (down) life, and immobilizing the body [...]. Julie Peteet (2008) calls the extraction of nonlabor time “stealing time” [...]. [T]he extraction of time attempts to produce a depleted and therefore compliant population so beholden to the logistics of the everyday that forms of connectivity, communing, and collective resistance are thwarted. The extraction of time functions as the transfer of “vital energy” [...], an extraction that recapitulates a long colonial history of mining bodies for their potentiality. [...]

Checkpoints ensure one is never sure of reaching work on time.

Fear of not getting to work then adds to the labor of getting to work; the checkpoints affectively expand labor time [...].

Bodies in line at checkpoints [...] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities of bodies [...]. It’s not just that bodies are too tired to resist but that the experience of the “constant state of uncertainty” becomes the condition of being. [...]

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All text above by: Jasbir K. Puar. "Spatial Debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism in Palestine". South Atlantic Quarterly 120 (2) pp. 393-414. April 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for criticism, teaching, commentary purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

do you have favorite sources for the short form works you read? journals/blogs/podcasts/etc you subscribe to?

Sure you know, since I've said this many times before, but I prefer short-form articles, essays, etc. to full-length books. More condensed information, often without superfluous "setting the stage" and introductory/re-hashed material, without the incentive to appease publishers or popular expectations. Easier to access, quicker to read and discuss with others. I'd prefer to read from activists and scholars outside of or ostracized from traditional academia, including outside of the US/Europe. (I don’t revere academia and the best “ontologies” or most “cutting-edge” theories in geography/space/place have already been considered and articulated by Indigenous thinkers and the Black diaspora for generations.) I look to so-called "critical geography" or "radical geography" journals, and the personal sites/blogs of activists and abolitionist groups.

Subjects I focus on: environmental history of empires and colonization; traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous geography and ways of knowing; Anthropocene, Capitalocene, legacy of plantation systems; extinction and introduced species; resistance, fugitivity, and carceral geography; refugees; the making and enforcement of borders, boundaries, frontiers, hinterlands; ruins, ruination, haunting, trauma, social death; Pleistocene fauna and Paleolithic/ancient anthropogenic environmental change; islands, tidalectics, archipelagic thinking; wastelanding and sacrifice zones; region-specific geography, especially the sea, Oceania, the Pacific, Caribbean, Latin America, and Turtle Island; human relationships with other-than-human creatures, multispecies world-building. (Long-form or full-length books I've previously recommended about these subjects.)

Journals:

My favorites:

Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography /// Geoforum /// AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples /// ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies /// The Global South

Human Geography: A New Journal of Radical Geography /// Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography /// Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism /// Island Studies Journal /// Environment and Planning D: Society and Space /// International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies

And also:

Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association /// borderlands /// Capitalism, Nature, Socialism /// Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies /// Settler Colonial Studies /// Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies /// Landscape History: Journal of the Society for Landscape Studies /// Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History /// Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters

Children’s Geography /// Environmental Humanities /// Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal /// Mobilities /// African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal /// Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language and Culture /// Emotion, Space and Society

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Some favorite scholars:

Postcolonial Caribbean environments: Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert; Eduoard Glissant; Aime Cesaire

Tidalectics, archipelagic thinking, the Pacific; international solidarity: Elizabeth DeLoughrey; Epeli Hau’ofa

Environmental debris left behind by imperialism; haunting; “social death”: Avery Gordon; Tim Edensor; Hugo Reinert; Ann Laura Stoler

Necropolitics/biopolitics: Arundhati Roy; Frantz Fanon; Neel Ahuja; Achille Mbembe

Carceral thinking; abolition; fugitivity: Harney and Moten; Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Alison Mountz

Wastelanding, hinterlands, at0mic waste: Traci Brynne Voyles; Phil Neel

Postcolobnial landscapes: Kathryn Yusoff; Iyko Day; Anna Boswell; Anna Tsing

Indigenous futurisms and ways of knowing; Turtle Island: Audra Simpson; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; Robin Wall Kimmerer; Kyle Whyte

Anti-colonial Latin America: Macarena Gomez-Barris; Paulo Tavares; Pedro Neves Marques

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General sources:

-- Interdisciplinary “radical/critical geography” sources, which might include informal blogs, personal sites of individual activists/scholars, and actual formal academic journals

-- Several smaller interdisciplinary region-specific academic journals (like, focused specifically on Latin America, the Caribbean, Indigenous issues, etc.);

-- The blogs of a couple of university presses/publishers, which include interviews with scholars and short summaries of new research (for example, the University of Arizona Press blog)

-- And, once I’ve discovered authors/scholars into the same interests, their personal sites, which is especially good for avoiding the privileged veneer of academia and instead reading the work of activists, refugees, Indigenous thinkers, agitators, prisoners, theorists, scholars from outside of academia.

Also, since so-called “critical geography” and “postcolonial / anti-colonial studies” have both exploded in attention in recent years, there are many anthology books published which collect short-form articles/essays from multiple different scholars. Specifically, some of the Routledge anthologies (Environmental Humanities, Environment and World Literature, etc.) routinely publish good collections of many different scholars. Same with some of the Palgrave handbook series. Search “Routledge” or “Palgrave handbook” alongside terms like: postcolonial, environmental, etc.

Geography stuff, because contemporary academic critical geography sees itself as so interdisciplinary that it won’t make distinctions between history, human ecology, political ecology, landscapes, “natural” ecology, etc. Everything situated in a wider context. So you get a fuller or more complete picture of “the issue” because they’re not hyper-focused only on, say, environmental science without considering local political history or whatever. All of it is mingled. Can discuss Indigenous ecological knowledge, histories of colonization/dispossession, ongoing neoliberal dispossession, and environmental science all in the same article. And then generally look for anything described as “critical geography,” basically considered its own field.

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Websites:

Arcadia (Environment and Society Portal); Edge Effects. Also, e-flux. Hard to describe e-flux, but they do a monthly journal on “architecture” broadly but radicalism (especially Black radicalism), postcolonialism, borders/immigration, and Anthropocene stuff more specifically, as well as hosting art shows and multimedia projects; high-quality writing but avoids the gatekeeping of academia, hosts writing of abolitionists/activists, etc. I check their website every day.

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Universities which host pretty good critical/radical geography communities/departments often have a blog (run by faculty or school press or whatever) where they promote new articles, new books, interviews with scholars, and accessible summaries of new research/publications. Specifically, some of my favorite publishing/features/stories come from the university presses of University of Washington (which focuses on PNW history) and University of Arizona (which focuses on borders/boundaries, frontiers, wastelands/deserts, and Latin America). Some of the better critical/radical geography and/or environmental humanities universities:

University of Victoria (BC) /// UW Madison /// UC Santa Cruz /// University of Washington /// University of Chicago /// University of Arizona (Tucson)

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Some of the better journals, with descriptions quoted from their online editorial board descriptions:

-- Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography: “Authors are encouraged to critique and  challenge settled orthodoxies [...]. Papers should put new research or  critical  analyses to work to contribute to strengthening a Left politics broadly  defined. This includes, but is not limited to, attention to how politics  of class, gender, race, colonialism, sexuality, ability are a core part  of radical theory and politics. Antipode’s Editorial  Collective welcomes submissions from all places, including the global  South and/or from those traditionally marginalised in the academy  (historically under-represented groups, regions, countries and  institutions).”

-- AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples: “... is an internationally peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal. We aim to present scholarly research on Indigenous worldviews and experiences of decolonization from Indigenous perspectives from around the world. [...] AlterNative was launched by Nga Pae o te Maramatanga, New Zealand’s Maori Centre of Research Excellence, to provide an innovative new forum for Indigenous scholars to set their own agendas, content and arguments and establish a unique new standard of excellence in Indigenous scholarship.”

-- Geoforum: “Geoforum is a leading international, inter-disciplinary journal publishing innovative research and commentary in human geography and related fields. It is global in outlook and integrative in approach. The broad focus of Geoforum is the organisation of economic, political, social and environmental systems through space and over time. Areas of study range from the analysis of the global political economy, through political ecology, national systems of regulation and governance, to urban and regional development, feminist, economic and urban geographies and environmental justice and resources management.”

-- The Global South: “The Global South is an interdisciplinary journal that focuses on how world literatures and cultures respond to globalization. Particularly of interest is how authors, writers, and critics respond to issues of the environment, poverty, immigration, gender, race, hybridity, cultural formation and transformation, colonialism and postcolonialism, transatlantic encounters, homes, diasporas, and resistance and counter discourse.”

-- ACME - An International Journal for Critical Geographies: “Our  underlying purpose is to make radical work accessible for free.  We set no subscription fee, we do not publish for profit, and no ACME   Editors receive any compensation for their labour. We note this not in   self-righteousness, but as a way to foreground the practice of   collective work and mutual aid. The journal's purpose is to provide a   forum for the publication of  critical work about space and place in the social sciences — including  anarchist, anti-racist, autonomist, decolonial, environmentalist,  feminist, Marxist, non-representational, postcolonial,  poststructuralist, queer, situationist, and socialist perspectives.  Analyses that are critical are understood to be part of the praxis of  social and political change aimed at challenging, dismantling, and  transforming prevalent relations, systems, and structures of  colonialism, exploitation, oppression, imperialism, national aggression,  environmental destruction, and neoliberalism.”

If I were to recommend just a few journals: Antipode; ACME; Geoforum; e-flux